


your blue-eyed boys (2: daylight could be so violent)

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: your blue-eyed boys [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: BAMF Betty Ross, Bucky's Overdeveloped Caretaking Instinct, C-PTSD, Disabled Character, Dissociative Disorders, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Eustress is Still Stress, Fix-It, Hydra did a number on Bucky, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Mentally Ill Character, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-Winter Soldier (movie), Psychological Trauma, Psychotic Episodes, Recovery isn't linear, Replacing Bucky's Arm, Rhodey is a scientist too, Shouty Brunet/te Scientist Club, Somatoform Disorder, Steve's Astonishing Devotion, Tony Expresses Affection/Appreciation/Support Via Money And Stuff, Trauma, kids who recognize Captain America, kids who recognize the Winter Soldier, memory recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 13:59:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 62,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1690826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Other than to cut me up, beat me, fight me or repair me, Steve," Bucky says, when Steve finally looks back at him, "the last person to touch me was you."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Part Two of _your blue-eyed boys_ ; the series should be treated as one story. The story uses only MCU canon up to _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ and extrapolates only from stuff actually in the films, plus [my previous series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/19685).

Let me uncover the silver in your dark hair / The weight of your bones / I want to witness the beauty of your repair / The shape you’ve grown

\--Vienna Teng

*****

Summer fades into autumn. Unfortunately. 

The thing about summer, even - maybe especially - late summer, is it's not _hard_ to stay warm, even if everyone else thinks it's too fucking hot. It hadn't really been a problem. The compromise Steve came up with was that the air-conditioner could be on in the living-room and in Steve's bedroom, and Bucky kept the door to his room half-closed or sat out on the balcony, and put up with Steve nagging about drinking enough water and occasionally fussing about heat-stroke. That, Bucky could do. 

A few days got too hot even for him, but only a few. He doesn't really - that is, he remembers that things happened last winter, more or less, he just doesn't remember what last winter felt like, beyond _fucking awful_. But August gives way to September and night gets cooler again, and it's not hard to look ahead and miss summer already. 

 

It's funny, in a completely fucking not-funny way, how the _why_ comes digging back in. After every nightmare, every bad day, every fucking time something cracks the fragile skin over all the shit he can only barely control. 

Every time he's afraid this is all something he's made up, every time the world slips completely out of focus and it's easier and easier to believe that's true, that he's neck fucking deep in the biggest lie he's ever told himself. Every time he crawls back from that and the real world's grey and sharp and he still feels like a fucking doll someone's used ragged and thrown away. 

Every time he thinks that all things considered that is something he has absolutely no fucking right to think, no right to feel. 

Last year he would've walked off a dock and let himself sink just to make the noise in his head and the endless screaming confusion stop and for a while, while it ebbed and drained, the relief was enough that he stopped asking _why_ , felt like there might be a point. 

Now the _why_ seeps back in and he's tired and he feels like he's on the other side of a mirror again. 

One answer to _why_ , the easy answer to the _why_ is Steve, but he tries not to lean on that. Doesn't like how much he's already cost Steve and doesn't know how to deal with the edges between real memories and ones he can't trust when it comes to _remembering_ Steve. Doesn't like the idea of tethering Steve to someone half-dead because of Steve's stupid, infinite loyalty. 

More than he already has. Can't help having done.

Steve does things that are really fucking bad for him because he thinks he has to. That's always been true, and it'll always be true, or he wouldn't be Steve. And it's something that's much, much too easy to take advantage of. Especially when Steve's already decided, already given himself over, already _done_ and put up with so much miserable shit that he won't think much of adding more. 

So Bucky sleeps (sometimes) and wakes up and eats (sometimes) and tries to find other things to shove in the places where _why_ is bleeding in, but they're pretty thin and they don't last for long, between bad nights and bad mornings. 

 

Mornings are relative: they start when he can't stand trying to sleep anymore. Sometimes his mornings start with Steve's around five-thirty in the morning; sometimes they start in the dark of two-AM; sometimes the whole fucking twenty-four hours is an endless, miserable morning. 

He mostly doesn't stay inside; most mornings he meets the start of Steve's morning from the roof, either by a few minutes or because he's been there for hours. Or at least out for hours. Steve runs on street level; Bucky still doesn't feel comfortable down there, avoids it if he can. Too many buildings, too many places someone could be waiting above him, and too many fucking people to run into. Up here, there's almost no one. 

Almost. 

 

This is the third time the girl's followed him up here at oh-God-o'clock. He allowed for two, because any kid would be curious about the recluse on the top floor, especially since there's a good chance someone would recognize Steve and start to wonder. Especially kids. They don't have as much between them and believing. Adults'll convince themselves something can't be true; kids, not so much. So two, he ignored. 

Three means the girl needs to learn a couple things, or at least get better at hiding. 

Her name is Mercedes; she lives with her mother and her brother on the second floor. Her mother works in the hospital and her brother's sick most of the time, and Bucky's not going to pretend that doesn't have something to do with his being willing to put up with her following him at all. And in the different mix of music he can't stop overhearing in the quietest moments of the building, he doesn't mind hers. 

How irritating other people's audio choices get: only one of the many things it doesn't matter whether they mentioned on the super-soldier enlistment form or not, because nobody fucking asked him anyway. 

He'd picked up one of the smooth coloured-glass pseudo-rocks Steve uses as a base for a little stand of bamboo on his way out, because he figured she'd follow him again. He waits until the kid's crouched down behind one of the air-exhaust chimneys before he turns and whips it at the corner just above her head. It showers her with glass fragments and dust and she shrieks _Fuck!_ in a choked off voice as she scrambles back - 

\- and she's really, really not expecting him to already be on the other side, leaning his right hand on this side of the chimney-box. 

Her eyes turn into little round black-and-white balls with almost no iris at all, and she's a little bit pale. 

"One," Bucky says, "don't stalk people. It's rude. Two," he continues, pushing off the side of the box and dropping into a crouch, "don't stalk scary-looking strangers, it's rude, dangerous and incredibly stupid. Three, _especially_ don't stalk them up to isolated places where no one can hear you scream, because _that's_ so stupid it's suicidal." 

Then he frowns and adds, "Four, watch your mouth, you're eleven." 

"Almost thirteen," she snaps immediately, proving without any reasonable doubt that she's got way more guts than brains. Then she looks down. "And sorry. But you live with Captain America so I figured you couldn't be that dangerous." 

"Not the worst guess," Bucky allows after a minute; in his case probably not a safe bet, but there's . . . complicated circumstances. "Still stupid. Definitely still God-damn rude." 

The girl sits up and runs her fingers through her hair, trying to get the bits of glass out and cutting up her finger, so that she yelps and sucks the blood off it. Bucky sighs. 

" _Shake_ the shards out, don't brush them," he says. "You're going to end up with slivers in your scalp." 

"Sorry," she says sourly, "they don't run a class on how to get broken glass out of your hair at my school, we can't get the funding." She tilts her head to the side awkwardly and tries to follow the advice. "And I was gonna say hello eventually I was just trying to figure out how you did it. Sometimes grown-ups and the older kids won't tell me, because they're afraid I'll try it myself, so I watch a lot." 

"Did what?" 

She's skinny and short for thirteen, and dresses too old for her age, except for the worn-out Tinkerbell watch with a sparkly face on her left wrist. She pulls her knees up and hugs them, nods towards the next building. "Get from here to there. I'm gonna be a traceuse, I'm into parkour, and people can't do that. I've watched, like, _every_ video on YouTube and everything, and some of the older kids practice around here so I watch. And that's, like - humans can't do that. I thought maybe there was a trick I could figure out that nobody else knew." 

It's the longest conversation he's had with someone who wasn't Stark or Steve in probably decades; it's surreal and unexpected and if she weren't working so hard not to be intimidated he might just tell her to mind her own business and get lost and chase her off if she decided to be stupid about it. Again. 

But she is working that hard, all skinny limbs and resentful kid-pride. And sometimes his sense of the fucking ridiculous is all he has between him and deliberately _not_ making it to the next roof, and what the hell, this is definitely ridiculous. 

"Yeah," he says, sitting down. "There's a trick."

"Yeah?" She perks up, glass-filled hair and bleeding finger forgotten. "What is it?" 

"Nazis," he says, suppresses a short laugh at her blank, blinking expression. 

"Really?" 

"Evil science Nazis," he confirms, hearing Gabe's voice for just a second over his and trying to ignore the itch that comes with it. It's true, and it's even honest for a certain value of honest. And for a second it amuses him. 

That evaporates when Mercedes bites her lip and says, "So you are the guy from DC," and then hunches her shoulders and hurriedly says, "My mom watches a lot of CNN and stuff, the TV's always on, and Jaime said - are you okay?" 

The question, the sound of sudden concern, actually makes him laugh, which helps, even if it's a kind of a painful laugh. "Kid," he says, "you are gonna get yourself killed some day." 

"You looked like Dad used to," she says, "just for a second. He, um." She shrugs. "He jumped off a bridge, so. Like, literally. So when people look like him I get worried." She shrugs again. "And like I said I don't think someone who lives with Captain America's gonna kill me. And _I_ recognize faces, no matter what anyone else says," she adds, with more than a little bit of defiance. 

"Kid, you are way too smart to be stupid enough to follow people around," Bucky tells her, his heart-rate starting its always too-God-damned-slow decline back to normal. 

"My name's Mercedes," she says. 

"I know." 

"So, evil science Nazis?" she asks, after a minute. "That sucks. That why you have that arm, too?" 

"More or less," Bucky replies. 

"You got better, though?" she asks, hopeful in that way of kids who get way, way too attached to someone they just met. He wonders why they do that. "I mean, there's no evil science Nazis here." Then she frowns. "I hope. And you're not killing people. And you're living with Captain America. He's your friend?"

Bucky considers taping a note to her mom's mailbox: _congratulations on raising a brave and confident kid. Now think about teaching her some fucking caution._ "Yeah," he says. "He is." 

"He seems like he'd be a good friend," Mercedes hazards. 

"Get lost, kid," Bucky says, pretty much done talking. "It's five AM, go watch some fucking cartoons. Eat breakfast. And learn some manners." 

She's not completely unable to take a hint and disappears pretty quick down the ladder between the attic and the roof. Bucky stays on the roof for another half an hour before coffee seems better than solitude and he drops down onto the balcony to let himself in and find some. 

 

Memory's pliable. You don't have to know the neuroscience, don't even have to have a working theory, in order to know that. You just have to watch people and watch how they remember what they _want_ to remember. What fits in their heads, with the way they want the world to work. Maybe for most people the truth is actually lurking in their brain somewhere, ready to take advantage of any opportunity to work its way out, but with his it's impossible to tell. 

There's no tell-tales, no subtle differences, nothing to _show_ him. The only thing he can do is try to find something that can either back him up or tell him he's braided something out of nothing again. 

He knows his memories have retooled themselves, sometimes, and a lot of the time to make something awful . . . less, painting in familiar and comforting faces where they can't actually be. That he's remembering something he wanted instead of something that happened. And that's not counting the part where sometimes he's pretty sure he's remembering hallucinations, triggered by pain or coming out of cryo or who the fuck knows what - drugs, poison, concussion, hypoxia, exhaustion, starvation. Anything. 

There are little islands of certainty, now. Some of them are pretty big, the biggest ones from when he and Steve were kids. Maybe because they were already written in, he'd been remembering them for years before HYDRA took him, or maybe because there wasn't anything in them bad enough for his subconscious to want to rewrite. 

They'd been hungry, sure, but never starving; cold sometimes but never freezing; Steve'd scared the shit out of him on a regular basis but he always got better; people died, but they died of normal things in normal ways and you didn't get too choked about that because one day you were going to die and if you forgot that, there was always a priest or someone's aunt or grandma to remind you and probably throw some threatening Bible verses at you on top of it. 

Hard things, but no Hell. No reason for his subconscious to try to protect him with lies. 

The War's different. From beginning to end, it's just one long reason to try to make shit up, and the story's written down by people with so many secrets, so many biases, so many agendas: maybe sometimes you can trust the _shape_ of what's there, and sometimes even the details, but the _lies_ are all in the silences, all in the omissions. In what isn't there. 

There are things he knows Jim and Dum-Dum conspired to leave out, he's talked about them with Steve or found some dissertation by some obsessed kid who decided to spend his life coughing his way through dusty archives and found the mission-reports for missions nobody'd heard about before. It means every God-damn silence is suspect, means that just because it's _not_ there written down doesn't mean it _didn't_ happen, and he spends a lot of time trying to dig between lines to find something that'll tell him which memories are real and which aren't. 

He mostly doesn't find it. He mostly doesn't expect to or even know what he'd do if he did. But he looks anyway. 

 

He remembers Carter better, now. He's wondered whether it's worth going back, explaining everything all over again to tell her it's not that he didn't like her, it's that he didn't trust Steve not to fall head over heels over heart over soul for someone he might not be able to keep, that Steve'd never been in love before unless you counted Marnie Hampstead when Steve was eight, and Bucky'd mostly taken that as a warning. 

That he hadn't blamed her, but wasn't sure she understood she was getting handed Steve's whole everything and that if she didn't want that much she should back out now.

He hasn't done it. Mostly because Carter probably won't keep the memory anyway, and besides it's a moot point now. 

Sometimes he wonders what would have happened if the past had played out like it'd looked like it would, Carter swapping that name for _Rogers_ and a collection of miniature Rogerses, Stevelings and Pegglets, to go with it. What _he'd've_ done and how long he'd've done it for. 

One bit of memory he's pretty sure of is that he'd stopped being able to picture anything to do with _after the War_ long before he fell off Zola's train. 

Looking over the notes pinned up in their clusters and guesses, and how useless a lot of them are, frustration boils over and he puts his left fist through the wall. Again.

*****

Stability is a matter of averages, as Tony has an annoying habit of pointing out: really, any apparently stable position is actually a constant fluctuation above and below a point people call "average", however small they might be. Sometimes that's comforting. Other times Steve could do with the fluctuations being smaller.

But it still counts, comparatively, as stability.

That doesn't mean he's not kind of worried. 

 

Recovery isn't linear. Steve reminds himself that a lot. He knows it - Hell, he even kind of knows it from himself, from the way he felt better in the months right after New York and then . . . didn't, so much. 

"But something's still bothering you," Elizabeth observes. 

They're eating lunch at her new favourite place, part of her agreement with Bruce that she will physically exit the Tower and be completely away from her lab at least once a day. Apparently they'd had a 'loud argument' about it (which is what everyone in the Tower calls it when the two fight, because nobody likes to think about Bruce being in a fight with anyone despite his assurances that it isn't a problem) after he'd found her fast asleep at her desk last week and found out from one of the students she'd been there since early morning without a break, after only leaving the lab when he came to get her around ten. 

Bruce had outright enlisted other people's help; the email had read _Invite us places. Hell, invite HER places if you don't like me - SHE needs to get out and REST or at least change scenery every now and then._ Her habit of moving into her lab and overwork was apparently long-standing - and got worse every time her father tried to reinitiate contact, which he's apparently doing a lot more these days. 

According to Bruce, Elizabeth disowned Thaddeus Ross during the entire Abomination mess, then recanted after he nearly got killed . . . and then disowned him again, permanently, about six months later. Even Bruce isn't sure exactly what the General _did_ , or maybe said, except that it was enough that Elizabeth won't even answer phone-calls and dumps all his email straight into trash. She's said that if and when it's necessary she'll arrange and pay for his care and his funeral, but she won't be attending either. 

Work's apparently her antidote for him trying to push that line back. Steve can sympathise with that, a lot, but every coping mechanism can go too far. So he joins them for lunch or coffee - lunch today - and Elizabeth remains unsettlingly good at seeing through him. 

"Actually, I think something's bothering _him_ ," Steve sighs. "I just don't know what, and outright asking's not much help. I'm still figuring out when to push and when to shut up. And sometimes even if I push, I'm still not going to find out what it is. It just means he stops shutting down for a while after I do." 

Bruce is sitting back, his food already done, his arm along the back of Elizabeth's chair, wearing a thoughtful frown. He's not big on jumping in where he doesn't think he's got something concrete to offer. Elizabeth's still eating, because she kept getting distracted talking and demonstrating things with her food, until Bruce interrupted her and reminded her the food was supposed to go in her mouth. 

It's funny how people are, Steve reflects. If you met Elizabeth casually you'd think she was quiet and calm and reserved, and that's pretty much the front she keeps up until she knows you enough to be comfortable that she isn't going to bore you out of your tree - her words - talking about what she cares about - and then she gets just about as animated as Tony can. 

It's kind of soothing to spend time around her and Bruce together. They're comfortable around each other, so much so that even fights seem to have familiar edges and dances, like they're almost a kind of ritual display to figure out who feels strongest about something. And when they aren't fighting, they're just . . . there, together, somehow subtly oriented towards each other even when they don't seem to be paying each other any attention. 

"Did you talk to him about working on his arm?" Bruce asks. "You'd mentioned last week you thought you might be able to, now."

Steve suppresses a grimace. "Briefly," he says. And it had been very briefly, one of the times Bucky shut down the conversation with outright words - _I'm not talking about this_ \- instead of body-language or getting up and walking away like he did if he didn't want to talk about something but wasn't quite willing to tell Steve to shut up. 

"Might be that," Bruce says, and then shrugs. "Probably a complicated thing even to think about - I mean," he goes on, glancing at Elizabeth's slightly puzzled look, maybe seeing it on Steve, too, "you look at it," he gestures to Elizabeth, "and you see a malfunctioning prosthetic and you look at it," and he gestures to Steve, "and see something new and maybe alien, and maybe even consciously so does he, but his _body_ knows it's been part of him for, what, seventy years? Bodies remember things heads don't sometimes," he says, with the look that means he's talking around something _he's_ not entirely comfortable with, which usually means about the Other Guy.

He looks at Steve and says, "Actually, you can probably figure part of it - I mean, you volunteered for your procedure, and you had plenty of reason to, but I don't think you can honestly tell me you didn't feel a little bit . . .queasy, about the idea of someone rewriting your whole body, changing everything you knew about it, even if it would be what you wanted." 

Steve nods, slowly. "A little," he admits. "I mean, it's - " 

"Right," Bruce says, when Steve can't find anything other than tautology to follow that with. "And with you, it's simple. Hell, with me, it's simple. Not necessarily _great_ , but simple." His face twists into a wry smile for a second and then gets serious again. "But I don't think it's necessarily simple for him. Except he might not even know why it's not simple." Bruce shrugs, leaning back again, replacing his arm behind Elizabeth's chair and waving the other. "I don't know for sure. Just a thought. And even if it's not a really big deal, well. Little deals can knock you off-balance so you fall into the big deals you were ignoring." 

When he says it, almost absently Elizabeth finishes her wrap and then covers Bruce's hand with hers; Steve wonders if she's even aware that she did it. 

"I guess nothing's allowed to be easy," she sighs. "Sorry, Steve." Steve dredges up a smile. 

"It is what it is," he says. 

He gets a sandwich to take home for Bucky, because they make good sandwiches at that cafe. He feels like it shouldn't worry him that when he puts it down on the table beside the couch, Bucky glances at it once and then picks it up to eat like he's not paying attention. 

Steve looks briefly over his shoulder: Bucky's back to the biographies and official unit histories, but this time he's got all of them somewhere around him on the couch or the floor and he seems to be flipping through to particular places, all of them somewhere in the middle. 

His frown is the frown of someone looking for something and not finding it. 

"You okay?" Steve asks. 

"I'm fine," Bucky says, which is basically what Bucky says when he's not actually fine. He doesn't look up but motions vaguely at the plate. "Thanks." 

Steve hesitates, but in the end even if he doesn't believe the claim of "fine", Bucky's not agitated or _upset_ , not displacing whatever it is that's bothering him onto anything Steve can see as bad for him, and he is actually eating, so he decides to leave it. For now. 

 

When Steve checks again a few hours later, Bucky's on a different book, and Steve catches a glimpse of Erskine's black and white picture on a facing page. 

"I was always kind of pissed off he died before I could punch him in the face," Bucky says without looking around. 

"Yeah?" Steve sits down in the arm-chair, leans forward with his elbows on his knees. "Why?" 

Now Bucky gives him a sardonic look. "Why do you think?" he asks. "I left you safe at home, where the biggest thing I had to worry about was you picking a fight with somebody bigger than you. Again." He flicks the picture. "Then this bastard gets you to run yourself ragged and sign up for live human experiments of dubious fucking survivability, considering what happened to the last guy. Then not only did he land you in Europe, _now_ it wasn't picking fights with guys bigger than you or I could handle I had to worry about, now you were nuts enough to think you could pick fights with whole fucking _armies_." 

The thoughtless part of Steve, the part that everyone's got that tries to make you say things before you've actually thought them through - that part _almost_ gets him to say, _We did okay_ before memory hits him with cold air and snow and a river far down below him, drops the bottom out of his gut for a minute and reminds him that actually they didn't. 

They got away with it for a while, was all. 

"I think the plan was for there to be more than just one of me," Steve says instead. 

"Yeah, well," Bucky says. "Someone picked up that plan and ran with it." And Steve tries not to wince. 

After a couple minutes of silence he asks, "You want to tell me what's - " 

"There's nothing to talk about," Bucky cuts him off. "Seriously. I'm fine." 

Steve sincerely contemplates saying _I'm supposed to be the terrible liar_ but decides to turn on NPR instead. 

After a while Bucky says, "We're out of drywall mud." Which means there's a freshly patched hole in the wall somewhere. 

"Copy," Steve says absently, and adds it to the to-buy list on the fridge when he's in the kitchen. 

 

It's _not_ that things get worse, that they're worse now than they were before. Steve makes himself confront that thought and show himself how it's wrong, because it is. It's just when every day was a sequence of dissociative episodes and problems and bad moments and, let's be honest, a lot of it is scraping against itself in Bucky's head and not _making_ it to the outside, that's the whole landscape of life. It's that slippery shape of "normal" again. 

Now they - he, Steve himself - have the luxury of "normal" being maybe a little bit more towards, well . . . normal. The kind of normal that involves people being okay for hours and even a day or two at a time, reading books and watching TV and going to Starbucks - which Bucky will now do, although it took a nasty heatwave for Steve to convince him that a coffee frap was worth it. And it's how everything else compares with that slightly-more-normal "normal" that makes everything else seem worse. 

When the calm exists, storms seem a lot more violent. 

 

No two episodes are exactly alike, in the same way that no two anything are exactly alike, but they fall pretty neatly into categories by now. 

Some are barely noticeable even to Steve, let alone anyone else: those ones show up as nothing more than a momentary tension, focus snapping to the middle distance instead of the here and now, a verbal tic, falling back on Russian for no reason (as opposed to making a point, swearing at people, muttering under his breath, or any other actual thing that would make it a deliberate choice), a change in posture and position compared to everyone else in a room or on a street. They're there, and they're gone, and while they're not any kind of fun they only become a problem if there's a constant stream of them in too short a period.

Others - well. 

It's not like Steve _likes_ owing Tony for buying out any potential neighbours, but it keeps the calls to the police down, and that's a blessing. 

(Not that Tony accepts that Steve owes him, and not that it doesn't still irritate the life out of Steve that Tony didn't bother _asking_ before he did it, but when it came to these things you could either accept Tony Stark the way he was or have nothing to do with him, because he wasn't going to change.)

And Steve can't exactly argue that it helps. That it's honestly probably the most significant factor in letting them stay _here_ , for values of "here" that are "a normal human residence." 

He's pretty sure Bucky would follow him if he moved into, say, the Tower or even off on some acreage somewhere, but some acreage would make it way too easy for Steve to be the only human being Bucky so much as saw in months - his isolation's already bad enough - and the Tower might actually be the best suited in some ways (he knows that's why Bruce and Elizabeth live there) but -

Firstly, "laboratory" or anything that looks remotely like one - any kind, chemical, biological, mechanical - is one of the few things _guaranteed_ to set Bucky off, even in film or in pictures, and the Tower is built on layers of them. Even if he never managed to accidentally end up in one, their purpose is built right into the walls, and Steve thinks that'd end up being a big problem, at least over time. And secondly, he's pretty sure that for Bucky it'd end up feeling like a prison. 

An incredibly luxurious prison, no argument there, but Steve's actually pretty sure Bucky still _doesn't_ believe him when he says nothing and nobody is monitoring them: definitely not with Steve's agreement or consent, almost definitely nobody he doesn't know about because by now he's pretty good at finding the damn bugs _thank you so much_ Nick Fury. The assumption doesn't seem to _bother_ Bucky, not yet, or at least not more than general consciousness does, but Steve's pretty sure it's still there. 

And even though Steve has a surprising amount of faith in Tony's assurances that nothing in the private suites of the Tower gets recorded, those assurances would be so much white noise to Bucky, even now.

Well, almost all assurances are still so much white noise to Bucky, but those ones would be worse.

The Tower, run by an AI, full of people, R&D, labs and and built to Tony Stark's personal specs - Bucky'd probably accept living there if Steve asked but Steve is still frankly disturbed by the number of things he's pretty sure Bucky'd accept if he actually asked (especially in the right frame of mind) and it'd be acceptance of moving back into the comfortable _certainty_ \- not suspicion, but certainty - of being monitored every breath he took and everything that came with that.

No, thank you. And in one of those flickers of intuition that are honestly unsettling to Steve, given what they all seem to be about, Stark's never even suggested it. He'd just bought out three units of a commercial-built complex with good soundproofing so that Steve's top-floor suite didn't share a structural feature with anybody else's.

And sometimes Steve's more grateful for that than he's comfortable with, if a recent episode's been . . .noisy.

Some people might call the ones that wreck half the furniture, or put an arm (either one, actually, although he's defaulting to the left which means he hurts himself less) through a wall or things like that the worst, and those are definitely the ones the space makes easier, but they'd only worry Steve if other people were around - worry him in the sense of collateral damage, nothing else - and they seem to come out of Bucky being relaxed enough for the hyper-vigilance to ease down a little and him to start thinking about more internal things, and if even Steve can be around and still have that happen - well, it's a bit of a paradox, but that's actually a pretty good day, even if it does come with a broken coffee-table or needing to replace a fridge. That's really not a big deal, comparatively. 

After all, it's New York: it's not like temporarily having a broken fridge makes it that hard to feed themselves at this point.

So those are mostly okay. It's other ones.

He's not about to ask Bucky what he thinks the worst ones are, but from the outside, the ones that seem the worst - and seem to linger the longest, and screw up the most - are the ones Steve mentally calls "world-slips". You could probably call them psychotic episodes. But Steve doesn't.

Steve gets the problem. Bucky's memories are a hacked out burned out _mess_ : even when he remembers something the markers for time or even order of events are lost, maybe forever; Steve's dated some of the ones Bucky can't, put some in order, based solely on things like when it's most _likely_ HYDRA would want someone of this or that or the other description dead, given the politics of the time, but that's . . . maybe a handful out of an ocean.

And Steve knows that on top of that, mixed in with useful memories are other kinds of mess, composite memories, misfires of neural connection, plus the things the human mind does to try and make sense of the slush of a mind wiped again and again and again, and even odds what parts of it are real, what parts of it are wish, or nightmare, or something he heard once, and which are two completely different things sewn together. 

Those are the worst, the biggest problems, especially when some echo of being the Winter Soldier crosses over with things that should be comforting, comfortable, good to remember. Cross over either way - either a comforting memory turned sick, or sometimes worse, Bucky's mind trying to take something that would make him sick and transpose it, make it okay, by taking it back to _their_ war and painting familiar faces in.

Those are pretty damn awful, and what's worse is that if Bucky's willing to _ask_ Steve about these things he's probably mostly in a good place. Until Steve has to tell him. Sometimes Steve's grateful he is so bad at lying; already knowing it wouldn't work anyway saves him from even having to resist the temptation to lie, to just let this one wrong memory stand because he can't stand the way Bucky's face shuts down at the correction.

Steve wouldn't do it. He'd _never_ do that. But knowing that he'd fail anyway means he doesn't even feel tempted.

Add a bad moment of flashback to all of that, and sometimes Bucky isn't sure where he is, or when he is, or who he is, or what's real, or what the world is.

It doesn't always look like much. You could almost mix it up with what Steve thinks of as _bad moments_ , the flashes that are gone, the psychological equivalent of a twinge in a bad joint. But it goes on longer, and the stillness is worse, and if you know enough to be able to tell these things you can see that what's driving this moment isn't irritation or frustration or anger or anything else that surfaces during those passing instants of unfortunate but passing bad.

It's terror. Which is much worse.

It's the _kind_ of terror you get when someone carves you into the Winter Soldier, which means it's one step away from abrupt and brutal violence and a watcher has to know how the mind works to believe it has anything to do with fear, but at this point, Steve can see it, believes it, and hates it. A lot. With a hate that projects back in time because it's the look Bucky wore almost all the time for months and now Steve knows what it means. What he didn't know enough to see at the time, which is just how bad those months were.

And the slips can come anywhere and from anything. That's probably the worst part of it. Before this, Steve had no real conception of how _often_ the subconscious reaches for memories, consults them, compares them to what's in front of you, tries to help you parse the real world. And it's _really often_ , and nothing he's found yet really helps those times except getting Bucky's attention and then waiting it out, until reality convinces Bucky it exists and the other stuff doesn't - not anymore - and he can sort everything out. 

And until then what Steve sees in Bucky's eyes reminds him much, much too much of - well. Moments on Insight C he's still livid ever existed, and make him regret - and this doesn't happen much, he doesn't actually hate _individual people_ much or that often but it happens with this all the time - how fast Alexander Pierce died and that gunshot wounds are relatively clean, as a way to shuffle off the mortal coil.

 

The only thing you can say for these things is that it's less awkward when they happen at home. Which is well into the realm of _thank God for small favours_ , but honestly, Steve's up for that, so today there's a small feeling of relief when he comes home from the store and it's pretty clear Bucky's checked out - relief that when Steve'd asked if he wanted to come to the store, Bucky'd said no. 

This was probably inevitable, because Bucky's been winding himself up over something Steve doesn't know and can't figure out all week. And it might not be as bad as it could be. It's hard to tell. 

Bucky's standing in the cut-out arch of the doorway into the kitchen. His left arm's raised, touching the frameless wall, a little weight on his fingertips like he was reaching out to touch it as he passed and froze there; his eyes are wide like the more he can see the more he can kill before it gets close to him. His breath is shallow, like his ribs can only move so far to let it in.

But there's no knife in his right hand; his fingers move restlessly, the only part of him that does. And if he's still and frozen, he's not wound so tense it's like his muscles are trying to crack his bones and then rip them apart. So Steve drops the bags and pulls the door closed.

The sound doesn't make Bucky jump; it doesn't even make him move, not any part of him except his eyes, which snap to Steve's face and focus. Narrow a hair. Maybe less. Steve shrugs off his jacket and says, "You okay?" as casually as he can.

Breath changes first: after a split second it's like Bucky can finally manage a full inhale, and the exhale takes some of the wound up stillness with it. And it lets him say, "Compared to what?" in a voice more bitter than makes Steve happy, but not off-kilter, not letting off any of the warning sounds he knows. 

Bucky pushes off the wall, points at the bags and beckons for Steve to pass some over, so Steve hands him the ones full of stuff that actually goes in the kitchen. Steve takes the ones for the bathroom and the little laundry room beside it, almost but not quite totally filled by the extremely quiet high-efficiency washer and dryer.

(Steve's still suspicious of those, but in a passive, familiar way that means he often doesn't even think about it. They supposedly came with the place, which had saved Steve the effort of taking the ones from his place in DC at a time he really hadn't wanted to think about moving, but Steve is _pretty_ sure that the machines that had been here before hadn't quite looked this much like they were going to take flight any minute now.)

(Someday he's not going to be able to stop himself from suggesting that maybe Tony should try not being an asshole from the get-go instead of flinging money and gifts at people afterwards by way of apology, but so far he's been able to keep that one down. Besides. They're good appliances.)

He throws the load from the washer into the dryer while he's here anyway, and reminds himself that they both need new clothes, makes a note to ask Bucky what he wants. Steve's got a strong suspicion the answer's going to be the same indifference as before, but maybe not. 

When he hits the start button and steps back out of the tiny space, Bucky's standing in the hallway, arms crossed, leaning on the wall, closer than Steve expects.

In one of those moments that happen sometimes, Steve can't help noticing that the neckline of the long-sleeved shirt Bucky's wearing has two holes in it, and that in addition to the hole in one knee, the hems of that pair of jeans are worn and frayed. These days as long as it's warm enough and soft enough - and Steve's only recently started to notice the latter preference, wonders if it's new or if Bucky just didn't feel secure enough to do anything about it before - and it covers him, Bucky's still completely indifferent to clothing. 

Steve refuses to let it throw him, but he can't not care that Bucky seems not to care. He tries not to compare, knows it shouldn't matter, but Bucky not caring about clothes, about how he looks, won't stop feeling twisted up and wrong.

Steve also can't help but figure that was probably not enough time for Bucky to have actually put everything away, but he's not going to look at it or fix it right now. Sometimes little niceties like putting stuff into cupboards and drawers fail to catch in Bucky's head: if everything was to hand when needed and otherwise stacked so you knew what you had and it was out of the way, utility and order were satisfied and sometimes so was he.

It usually wasn't a good sign; at the far end of that was the bare room in Prague, and besides, it's not a _choice_ ; Bucky's not deciding that putting stuff away is more work than he wants to do, he's just . . . forgetting why he'd bother. Today, though - or at least right now - is not the time to point that out or even go look. It can wait. Cans, boxes, bags and tetra-packs stacked on a counter for a while never hurt anyone and Steve doesn't exactly need an extra sign that Bucky's strung slightly wrong right now.

Bucky watches him with the look Steve still can't read, beyond that it's wary but . . . not. Wariness without tension. Maybe wary about something he might need to brace for, not get away from or stop. But something else, too. He doesn't know. It tugs unpleasantly at Steve's mind, at _his_ memory, like he's seen it before and it disturbed him then.

He says, "Something wrong?" which is definitely leaving himself open to a response even harsher than _compared to what?_ but fills the silence.

And he remembers where he saw the look, just . . . worse, more, in Bucky's room with the broken chair and shattered glass from the pictures on the wall. And just about the time Steve clues into that, he realizes that where Bucky's standing, he's actually _blocking_ the way back to the living-room and the rest of the condo. And Bucky looks away and says, "I remember Breitenau."

Steve feels like someone hit him with a - actually, no, he feels like a normal person would feel if someone hit them in the head with a board, because at this point he's been hit with a lot harder and heavier and walked away from it, up to and including the arm that Bucky mostly covers and doesn't seem to know what to think about. 

So like a normal person, stunned and off-balance. And then like a normal person with a head injury trying to think fast, trying to think about consequences and results to avoid the ones that terrify him. 

_I remember Breitenau._ Maybe, maybe for a minute Steve can smell burned out houses in the rain and explosives, gasoline and sweat and alcohol and everything that's war at the front edge, feels the edge just short of exhaustion and the exhilaration of everything he'd been, _they'd_ been able to do -

And maybe for a second the weight of Bucky beside him, half on him, on a couch that has one broken leg replaced by burnt out books, the smell of alcohol on Bucky's breath and him laughing _Christ, if this is how dense you are no wonder your lady agent hasn't managed to get you into bed yet -_

Maybe for a minute that drowns him but it mostly turns into ache, maybe wish, maybe _longing_ mixing with fear of fucking everything up, twisted together and crawling all the way up to his throat and choking him. Steve doesn't answer right away. Steve _can't_. 

But enough of the right things must show on his face to tell Bucky his mind wasn't making this up. The breath Bucky lets out empties everything; the one he takes in is the kind drowning people take when they break the water.

Steve realizes he's raising his hand to rub at his forehead, or his temple, or even pinch the bridge of his nose, his mind still - well, he'd call it racing but it's mostly spinning its wheels in the mud, because this is not something he was ready for yet; something in fact he'd locked down damn tight, as much as he could, to be safe. But that doesn't matter now, what he's ready for or not doesn't matter now, so he forces himself to clear his throat and start to say, "Yeah, we should probably talk abou - " and doesn't get further.

It's not faster than he _can_ react, because just about nothing is. It's just faster than he wants to, or has a reaction ready, so it might as well be faster than he can: he still ends up with Bucky shoving him back into the wall and stepping in close, left hand flat in the middle of Steve's chest. And there are so many reasons Steve being caught by the sheer beauty of the single movement that does it all is _incredibly wrong_ and really _not helpful_ but he is anyway.

Jesus.

" _No._ " Bucky's close enough that Steve can feel the word as much as hear it, "We're not _talking_ ," and he says that like a curse, "and if you try right now I swear to _God_ I will go back to trying to _kill you._ "

Empty threat. The back of Steve's brain tries to slide a _probably_ in there and he shoves it away: empty threat, just not one that didn't mean anything. He can't _read_ what's in Bucky's eyes, not really, but he can't look away either. And Bucky takes a breath and says, "Two words and you pick _one_ of them, Rogers - _yes_ or _no._ " 

_Christ._

And the right answer is _no_ , with a lot of reasons the right answer is no - probably no - if there _is_ such a thing as a right answer right now and Steve's not convinced. The responsible answer is _no_ but maybe everyone gets one mistake.

Well. No they don't. Not really. That's not how it works. There are no free shots. Every mistake can kill you. Every mistake can be a disaster. Can be the end.

Steve ends up with his hands on either side of Bucky's head and his mouth against Bucky's mouth anyway. Because. Because he can. Because Bucky is _here_ , because he’s alive, because Steve has missed him so goddamn, so fucking much it _still hurts_ and because there is a limit. A limit to something. To everything. A limit he’s hit. Because Brooklyn because Breitenau because _Bucky_ \- 

Because _I’m sorry_ means even less when you can’t even explain why, explain what’s your fault, except that if you could go back the way you were thrown forward he would, he would and do everything, _everything_ different.

Do everything better.

And because _I missed you_ and because _I don’t want to miss you anymore_ and because maybe everybody’s weak some way and this is his. Has always been his. It might be a test and he might be failing, but _God_ , he can't not. He'd taken everything, all of this and stuck it behind a wall, and now the mortar's worn away and everything's flooding out again. 

_God, I missed you._

Bucky’s left hand closes on the front of his shirt, twisting in it, knuckles hard and cold through the fabric; his right hand slides behind Steve’s head and his mouth opens against Steve’s and now memory is Steve’s problem and the problem is too much, so many, all the times just like this except the wall was an abandoned house in Belgium, France or Germany and everything was - 

_Familiar._ Details, every detail different. Except everything that matters, down to Bucky's weight against him, tension of _God_ knows how long relaxing out of his body against Steve's. Down to _I thought I lost you_ , down to the edge of desperation, down to -

It’s like a light. 

It’s actually like a goddamn light going off in his head. It's a good thing he's against the wall already or the dizzying brightness might make him fall. _Steve you idiot._

The light goes off, memory hits understanding and Steve realizes he’s an idiot. He’s an _idiot_. He was an idiot then and he’s an idiot now and he understands why, finally - why the night in Breitenau ever happened, why Bucky then threw himself on the battered sofa in the half-blown-out house beside Steve and half-fell on him and why that ended with Bucky half in his lap mouthing at his neck and making fun of him for being oblivious - 

He hadn’t asked then, any time after, too stupidly happy and grateful for _everything_ and too afraid of breaking something; he doesn’t ask now because he finally doesn’t need to. Because - how do you stop feeling half dead, cut off, lost, how do you stop feeling like a weapon instead of a person - well, Steve figures this would work. 

This would work _just fine_.

Because he’s _still_ an idiot Steve pulls away to take a breath and to start to say “I’m sorry - “ but Bucky yanks on his shirt and breathes, “Shut _up_ ,” bites Steve’s lower lip and shifts to grind his hips against Steve's with very _clear and definite_ intent to keep Steve from thinking, let alone talking. 

So Steve gives up and puts his apology in another kiss, harder and deeper; he moves his hands, sliding them up Bucky’s back under his shirt. He keeps his right hand down at Bucky's lower back, well clear of the left shoulder where metal and skin meet.

With the fraction of his brain still thinking he doesn’t think that’s a good idea, not yet. Doesn’t think they’re anywhere _near_ working on being okay with that.

Steve’s fingers and palms slide over scars he doesn’t know, stories he doesn’t know; he tries not to think about how deep, how bad he knows injuries have to be to leave scars at all. One or two scarred places when he touches them Bucky shifts or flinches and Steve moves his hands away, not going there, either. 

Bucky pulls away for a second, long enough for Steve to help him get rid of his shirt. Apparently that’s it for a while, though; before Steve can move to get rid of his Bucky’s back up against him thigh to shoulder, left hand on the wall beside Steve’s neck, right hand sliding from Steve's lower back down under the waistband of Steve’s jeans, mouth on the hinge of Steve’s jaw.

Through the haze of relief and elation and just plain lust something occurs to Steve, and he manages to say, “There is actually a bed in less than twenty feet on the left.” Then his head falls back against the wall as Bucky’s teeth scrape against the spot just below Steve's jaw, the side of his throat. _Christ_ yes, that, he'd been deliberately not thinking about Bucky doing that for a long time. 

Bucky’s breath is cool against skin where his mouth was when he mutters, “You and your fucking beds,” against Steve’s neck. Steve laughs, light-headed.

“Actually I was thinking fucking _in_ bed," he says. And for the first time in either years or decades, depending on how you look at it, Steve hears Bucky laugh. 

It’s different and darker, short and feral instead of loud and light like Steve remembers but it’s still a laugh and he’ll take it. He'll take everything and whatever he can get. And oh God please don't let it be a mistake.

Please.

Bucky gets one of his knees between Steve's legs and says, "Bed's over there, wall and floor are right here," and that is _incredibly_ persuasive, especially with Bucky rocking against him and scraping fingernails over Steve's low back - either returning memory or a _very_ lucky guess - and Bucky's breath in his ear. 

What Bucky knows about sex is possibly - probably, oh Christ, _hopefully_ and Steve shies away from that thought fast - dim memory and instinct and body-memory and whatever he's read since coming here, but at least _one_ of those is working really well. Steve just has the advantage of remembering that walls and floors sound great before and end up being uncomfortable, cold and often sticky afterwards.

He turns his head to catch Bucky's mouth again, fingers of both hands tangling in Bucky's hair and that's new enough to keep him from losing track of what he meant to do and just getting completely lost in here-and-now and what he's been rigidly forbidding himself to even _think about_ for months because it wasn't right and for so long before that because it hurt too much. 

The kiss gives him enough leverage to slide away from the wall, a little, for the few stumbling steps down the hall so that when Bucky's protest turns into a push this time Steve's back's against the doorjamb. Since the door is open, the push means Steve half-turns and for a split second Bucky loses enough balance that his left hand falls on Steve's arm to steady himself. 

Steve makes absolutely damn sure he doesn't react to the touch of the metal or that Bucky's fingers dig in slightly too much.

"Cheat," Bucky says, letting go and pulling Steve away from the door and now apparently as impatient to get Steve's shirt off as he'd been unwilling to give Steve the space to in the hall. Steve thinks he hears something rip on his right, but he has more shirts.

"Yeah, well," Steve says, as Bucky pulls him the last three steps to the bed and down onto it, and that's about as much coherence as that gets.

It's a mostly controlled fall. Mostly. Steve's part of it has some control, anyway, because he catches himself on one arm and manages not to land with his knee driving into Bucky's hip instead of beside it. But his forehead still bumps against Bucky's just hard enough to sting, enough to drag out an _ow_ from Steve and another few breaths of laughter from Bucky and a _sorry_.

"No you're not," Steve says, because he only sort of managed not to fall on top of Bucky and the collision of skulls seems to be the price of of Bucky's thighs pressed against the outside of Steve's hips and Bucky arching his low back to press himself right up against Steve. If Bucky's still cautious of his left hand - and he is, even here, a little - he's using the rest of him and gravity to make up for it.

"Yeah, not even a little," Bucky admits, pulling Steve's head down again with his right hand and Steve swears, all his protestations (true ones!) to Natasha aside, he'd forgotten what kissing could be. Forgot it could be _this_ , something to completely lose himself in, something to make him moan all by itself - and Hell, who knows, maybe it _can't_ anywhere else, with anyone else. 

At this point he's willing to believe that. He's willing to believe anything that means this won't stop.

He lets himself fall onto his side, roll onto his back to rest against pillows so he doesn't have to lose one hand to holding himself up, drags Bucky with him to only minor protest, ending with one of Bucky's knees between Steve's and Bucky braced on his left hand.

Steve catches the side of Bucky's face, tilts Bucky's head back with one hand so he can kiss and nip at his throat and says, "Shut up, you jerk, I'm trying to get hands free to touch _you_ instead of the sheets." 

Because Bucky is - was, and nothing says it's anything but the same now - like a cat, always, with Steve, with the girls he used to chase, with everyone, and there are times Steve would have sworn that if Bucky could get away with just crawling into someone's lap and rubbing all over them he _would._

Not that he'd ever say that out loud. Ever.

For a while, anyway.

Bucky might have had something to say, but it gets lost in a noise mostly like _nnng_ when Steve strokes down the side of Bucky's neck to his right shoulder, thumb brushing back and forth along his collar-bone, proving his guess right. Steve puts his other hand on Bucky's waist, just above the jeans that they are both _seriously_ going to have to get rid of soon, and Bucky actually shivers - good shivers - when Steve slides that hand up his back. He's careful of the places Bucky flinched from before, but now apparently he either doesn't notice or doesn't care: the muscles in Bucky's shoulders flex and he shifts like he's trying to encourage Steve to touch every inch of skin possible. 

Which Bucky then completely undermines, if it was his plan, by leaning forward and down to kiss Steve again, grinding his knee possibly maybe probably not accidentally into Steve's crotch and making him gasp up into the kiss that turns into several, until Steve pulls back enough to say, "Okay, we need to get rid - " 

And Bucky says, "Uhhuh," and they nearly don't anyway, and Steve has never hated buttons and tiny zippers more. He might have worried about the lack of, well, _anything_ you might have in, say, the bedside table drawer if you had any kind of inkling of having sex any time in the near future, except that by the time they do get rid of the last of their clothes neither of them is willing to let go long enough or move far enough or be anything _other_ than skin to skin, legs tangled up and mouth on mouth. 

Until it's over, until Steve is arching up against the crease of Bucky's thigh, until Bucky stops sucking at Steve's neck long enough to presumably curse in what Steve barely recognizes as Russian, and then tries considerately not to collapse on top of Steve, who deliberately ruins that by wrapping one arm around Bucky's ribcage and resting the other hand on the back of his neck and pulling him down to lie against Steve again, skin to skin again, Bucky's left arm across half of Steve's chest and Bucky's breath against his ear. 

Bucky says something Steve doesn't recognize, and then, " _Fuck_ ," and the obvious pun is so bad Steve can't help laughing, weakly, still catching his breath. There's a thread of practical thought that tries to say they have a seriously limited time before discomfort sets in, but Steve metaphorically not only clubs it to death but sets it on fire. 

He will stay here as long as he can, just like this, and pretend he's not completely God-damn terrified of what might happen in ten, fifteen, thirty minutes. Stick with now. Turn towards Bucky and rest his forehead against Bucky's and hope that whatever happens, it isn't - wrong. 

After Steve's not sure how many quiet minutes, Bucky says, "I fucking hate history. No. I fucking hate _people_." 

" . . .hn?" is all Steve manages to end up saying, because he really doesn't see where that's coming from, or what it means. Bucky shifts a bit down, so he can actually rest his head on Steve's shoulder. 

"If people weren't so fucking stupid," Bucky says, "we wouldn't've had to keep any kind of fucking secret, and I wouldn't've had to spend two fucking weeks trying to decide if I could deal with finding out I fucking made everything up." And there's a thin skin of joke there, in the railing against the narrow-mindedness of "people" - but it's a _thin_ skin over something Steve suspects is pretty raw. Well. Is pretty _sure_ is. 

"Jesus," he says, softly. "Two w - " 

"Shut up," Bucky says. Steve shuts up and smooths his hand down and back up Bucky's back until the muscles he just felt tense up relax again. And then even the thin skin's gone, and Bucky breathes, "Fuck. I missed you." And his voice is raw enough to make Steve's chest hurt.

There's things to say, there's whole books, whole careers of poets and writers who sat around and polished things to say at moments like this, but what Steve manages is, "Yeah," and it's heartfelt and it's sincere and he still doesn't blame Bucky at _all_ when he starts laughing. 

Still new, still darker and sharper, but while Steve could probably care less he'd have to really try. He wouldn't've blamed Bucky for making fun of him, either, but he just pushes himself up to brace on his left arm and kisses Steve instead, a very clear invitation to do everything over again, maybe with more thought this time. 

Maybe. 

 

It's not surprising that eventually both doze off, comfortably sprawled, Bucky on his back, Steve on his front with his arm thrown across Bucky's body, Bucky's right arm relaxed towards Steve with his fingers by Steve's throat. 

It _is_ surprising that when Steve rouses out of the doze twenty, thirty minutes later, Bucky doesn't - that Bucky is, as far as Steve can tell, deeply asleep. 

He'd shifted to turn towards Steve, a little. Or maybe just towards curling on his side, left arm shielding his stomach and throat, Steve thinks. But only a little, not all the way there, so that his left arm rests bent on his ribs and his head falls to one side, hair falling over his eyes, mouth just open, breath slow and regular and shallow as sleeping breath is. 

Bucky doesn't rouse when Steve moves very, very carefully, and that's a bigger surprise. It's almost as if, Steve thinks, having for once gotten Bucky to relax and let go, his body's dragged him down as deep into sleep as he can get, for as long as he'll let it. 

It's late afternoon. The sun's moved far enough that the room's cooling down and that's what woke Steve up, that growing sense of slight chill. He pushes himself up on his arm, looks around and then reaches for the full-sized blanket he keeps at the foot of the bed, an old habit for just-in-case. It's a kind of fleece; Steve got it over a year ago because he'd been fascinated by just how soft it was and it's lived at the foot of his bed, mostly ignored, ever since. 

It's half kicked off the bed, rumpled up and and unfolded, but it's within arms' reach and one-handed, Steve awkwardly shakes it open to pull over both of them. If Bucky's managed to sleep - actually _sleep_ \- it'd be a Hell of a shame if he woke up because he got cold. 

This time, he's moved enough that Bucky's right hand isn't touching his skin anymore and Bucky shifts, brows pulling together; when Steve moves back, catches Bucky's hand and brings it up to rest against his lower shoulder, Bucky's face smooths out again and he stops moving. Steve feels himself half-smile, shakes his head and pulls the blanket up to Bucky's shoulder. 

Apparently he's not going anywhere for a while. 

He knows that as a rule Bucky still sleeps on the floor, though by now his distaste for any kind of cold means there's a thick wool fire-blanket underneath him and another two blankets on top. He sleeps in whatever clothes he wore during the day, with a hooded sweatshirt on top, and Steve knows that if you were to go looking, there's at least four knives and two guns in easy reach. 

And Steve knows that mostly, Bucky sleeps in broken chunks, one REM cycle at a time if not less. He _knows_ he's never seen Bucky this deeply asleep, suspects that if it's happened at all in all the time Bucky's been with him here, it's only been a handful of times. 

You wouldn't think you could forget how to fall asleep, how to stay asleep. Steve still thinks that's got to be one of the stupidest tricks the human body - enhanced, unenhanced, who cared - could pull. But you could, and Bucky did, and it's enough of a relief here to see him sleeping that Steve pulls a page from the cliche handbook and stays where he is and stays awake to watch him, at least for a few minutes. 

There's a tension to Bucky, always, even when nothing's wrong, like wire strung under his skin pulling at parts of him and if it's not _gone_ it's less: less in his neck, his jaw, his face, his shoulders. Now the fingers of his right hand are loosely curled around the lower forearm of the arm Steve's leaning on, less like Bucky's actually trying to hold onto anything and more because that's how they fit, where they fell. Steve runs the side of his thumb along Bucky's arm and there's less tension there, too. 

Steve considers calling himself an idiot again, but figures he probably got the point last time. Everything's obvious in hindsight, and it's so easy to forget - not just the big, obvious things like sex and whether and how it happened, but little things, like how much Bucky used to touch people, whoever he could, parents and friends and comrades and Steve and any girl who'd let him. Steve wonders if that kind of thing is built in, some how, stamped into your body when you're born and if it is - 

Steve reaches over and brushes Bucky's hair away from his eyes, rests his hand against the side of Bucky's neck and jaw and brushes his thumb along Bucky's cheekbone. And Bucky's still asleep but his head turns, moves into it anyway, just barely, and if Steve's done calling himself names he's not sure he'll ever be done apologizing, at least where Bucky can't hear and threaten to throw things. 

_Sorry for not coming back for your body that wouldn't've been there, sorry for not looking, sorry for crashing into the ocean and being no good to anybody, sorry for being an idiot_ (okay, maybe not completely done) _and not just staying still to show you the way home, sorry for being an idiot until now and forgetting you were you, even with everything I say over and over_ \- Bucky wouldn't want to hear a single word, but Steve thinks them anyway. 

His hand brushes down the side of Bucky's neck to his shoulder; the scar between metal and skin isn't as livid as it can be, but Steve still notices and wonders if it's safe enough yet to talk about getting Bucky's left arm fixed, replaced, the hack job redone by people who if _nothing else_ care about how pissed off Steve would be if they didn't do it well, and that's probably, almost certainly selling them criminally short. 

He's not sure. It's complicated, deeply complicated, probably even more complicated than Bruce thought. Bucky's left arm is a weapon and a shield, inflicted and forced on him and a symbol of so many fucking horrible things and at the same time a kind of comfort, safety, something he's had longer than two generations have been alive. 

Something almost certainly causing him constant pain, Steve thinks, except he probably doesn't even feel it as pain anymore, and where do you go from there, and how much strength is worth how much pain? And that, that is not Steve's decision and he damn well knows it, but the decision even try to talk about it again . . .

He doesn't know. Not right now, anyway. 

It's late afternoon and Steve thinks the chances of either him or Bucky sleeping through the night from here are slim, but he figures any deep sleep Bucky can get is worth throwing off the cycle of the day, and it's easy enough to get food at midnight. 

Bucky shifts again when Steve settles back down, but it's towards him and only for a second; Steve wraps his arm around Bucky's body again, and maybe prays, one more time - _please, let this be okay._

Then he chases sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

Knowing why things happen helps. 

He remembers _too well_ what the terrified confusion of _not knowing_ felt like, feels like, to have pain, sickness, fear, _everything_ happen and have no idea why or where it comes from or how to make it stop or if it'll ever will. Knowing why, knowing what the fuck is happening, helps. 

It just doesn't help a _enough_. 

So he knows _why_ , after relief, after _sleep_ , after everything he wanted right now and everything going right, he only gets six hours of the next day before disquiet sets in. Before the Latin alphabet gets hard to read again. Before he has to stop and fucking _think about_ what language is going to come out of his mouth, before disquiet turns to agitation turns to - 

Before he has to leave. Before he _can't be there_ anymore, not inside, not near Steve, not close to any idea of _home_ because it's not _home_ anymore it's a trap waiting to show teeth and all of that is fucking insane and he knows exactly why it's happening and that makes no fucking difference at all. 

He can't.

There's no "or else", it's not that he has to leave _or else_ something will happen, to stop himself from doing something, to avoid something - nothing, it's just going, just escape. He can't be here. There. Anywhere, for more than a few minutes. Underneath there's a twisting thread of him that wants to kill something and it might even help, but there's nothing to kill and nothing to fight, nothing even to fucking run from and that makes it worse. 

He's miles away before he has to stop. 

No, before he makes himself stop; he's nowhere fucking near when he _has to_ , nowhere near the point where his body can't do anymore, where the souped-up fucking _thing_ he never wanted or asked for will actually give out, actually quit working, actually keel over and force him to stop. He doesn't have to stop. He makes himself stop, because this is _stupid_ ; he makes himself stop because he's fucking thirsty and he needs to go down to street level and find something to drink. 

No. He doesn't need to. He _should_. "Need" doesn't help, "need" doesn't _work_ \- he doesn't get that, doesn't get a failsafe. Just choices. 

He keeps a couple twenties folded up in the sheath of one of the knives it's too far past habit to always, always have; this time he remembers to take one of the bills out _before_ he gets down to where people can see him, before he needs to pay for anything and the awkward moment that comes after. Understandably, people get a little _worried_ when you take out a knife, even if it's only to get the cash in there with it. 

A corner store gets him a bottle of water and that's about as much human interaction as he can take; he goes back up to the roof-tops before he hits _too much_ , before overstimulation starts reducing human shapes to identified targets or obstacles, assessed and planned for. That's _not_ safe; he doesn't know what he'd do if one of them startled him, and he doesn't want to find out. 

 

On the roof he sits with his back to the concrete block that holds the door he came out of. Snarled up echoes in his head are telling him he's been here too long, been in one place too long, but he manages to shove them away. He drinks half the water and then sits, knees bent, with the bottle dangling by its neck from his fingers. He folds up what's left of the twenty, leaves the coins from his change scattered on the roof for someone to find or to just sit there and corrode over years, he doesn't much care which. 

There's hours of daylight left and if he lets himself he'll keep moving for all of them in pointless circles - all of the daylight hours and at least some of the dark. He wants to go back. He, himself, the person - _he_ wants to go back. And he can't, he knows he can't, something twisted up inside won't _fucking_ let him; frustration means he hits the back of his head against the wall just hard enough to feel, that his left hand closes over some of the gravel that coats this rooftop. Crushes and grinds rock down into powder and rough sand. 

He wants to go home, and he can't. Until this runs out, he can't. Because he got what he wanted, because something he wanted turned out to be real, he can't go back to it because the broken fucking _mess_ that is his head won't let him. 

And right now there's not a fucking thing he can do about it. 

And he tries not to think much about Steve, tries to remind himself that Steve's read the same shit he has - read it all before he did, even - and knows, should know, fuck, _hopefully_ knows what this is, what it does and doesn't mean. And then he tries to ignore the humiliation in that, in knowing what could be understood or forgiven. 

That part he doesn't do great with. He never does. 

He can't manage food, either. He doesn't bother trying, takes the hint from the fact that the smell of cooking - smells that should be good - turns his stomach sour enough to make him gag on the water he makes himself drink. By the time the moon's up he finds another place he can force himself to sit, to be still for an hour or maybe three. Tries to find even bleak amusement in knowing that if he threw himself off, even at this height, he'd still be alive at the bottom. Maybe broken right the fuck up, but alive. 

He doesn't actually know what it would take to kill him, at this point. Frustration aside, he's not actually in a hurry to find out. 

 

He doesn't manage to make it home, to make himself go home before morning, or make himself go in until Steve's gone out. This time he takes his phone, some of the protein bars from the cupboard. Leaves the cupboard door open on purpose. Leaves the light on in the bathroom on purpose. Leaves a hole in the wall by accident. Manages not to shatter the mirror. 

He's gone by the time Steve gets back, and hates himself for it. 

The second night he makes it home sometime around one in the morning, through the window into his room, manages maybe to doze for an hour or less in the closet corner by the lamp, to change his clothes and brush his teeth around four in the morning and leave some sign he was there. Feels guilty as fuck and pathetic as Hell and tries not to think about it because it doesn't help, makes the twisted up crazy want to run further and not come back at all. 

He throws up what he tries to eat around midday. Tries again in the evening and keeps it down. Manages to go home before Steve goes to sleep, but not to open the door to his room and sits on the bed staring at the web of half-remembered mess on his wall, and at the door, wondering if he wishes Steve would stop being so fucking careful and considerate and just open it, or if that would make everything so much worse, and hating that he doesn't know. 

 

In the morning he can make himself stay on the building. Barely. 

And he forgets it's a weekend until the kid Mercedes throws open the door to the roof, walks out completely oblivious to anything and everything and _then_ sees him, stops, holds up both hands and says, "I was _not following you_ , I just came up here to practice falling, so like don't . . . yell at me or anythi - do you know you're bleeding? In, like, more than one place?" 

The sound of the door slamming open had him on his feet with a knife in his hand; frankly he's fucking grateful she started talking, that he could _hear_ little-girl words in a little-girl voice and force everything automatic back behind him. _And_ that apparently she's distracted enough by something else that he can put the knife away before he tries to make sense of what she'd said and not worry about explaining. And she'd said - 

_Do you know you're bleeding?_

He didn't. He hadn't noticed. He glances down, sees his knee, jeans ripped through and damp with blood around the edges of the hole, his right arm with a gash from elbow to forearm, maybe something else he can't see. "It'll stop," he says. 

"I'm pretty sure that one should have stitches," Mercedes objects, pointing to his arm. When he just gives her a long look she says, defensively, "Well it probably should. It's pretty messed up. What, did evil science Nazis teach you not to care about - wow that was about to be a really shitty question to ask," she says, suddenly wide-eyed. 

He's more surprised she caught it than anything else. And frankly the answer to that question is _yes_ and right now that strikes him as more bitterly funny than anything, but - "Watch your mouth," he says, "you're still twelve. And yes. It was." 

"Sorry," she says, wincing. She actually looks it. "But, um. It does look like it should have stitches." 

"Kid - " he starts, and she interrupts. 

"My name is _Mercedes,_ " she corrects with a bit of heat and then shuts her mouth when he gives her a pointed look. 

" _Kid_ ," he repeats. "Shut up. Practice your falls. Learn some manners." 

He moves past her to the door. He's turning the handle when she says, "Well do _you_ have a name?" 

Bucky looks at her. Now her back is straight and her chin is up, like she knows she's pushing it but she's going to do it anyway. Jesus. "Seriously kid?" 

"You said learn some manners, knowing people's names is manners," she retorts, looking like she's proud of herself for thinking that one up. And actually, it's pretty good, as counters go. 

"James," he says, after considering for a moment, considering whether he wants to have a name to her. To anyone else. But it's probably inevitable and it'll shut her up. "Don't fall off the fucking roof," he adds. "Your mom doesn't need to bury a kid on top of a husband." 

The door closes on any response she might make.

*****

A while back, Steve did get around to asking Elizabeth for the story Tony mentioned, about the first time Bruce asked her on a date. He'd been curious. She'd laughed, sounding at least twenty years younger than she is, and pretended to hide her face before pulling herself together and turning on a story-teller air.

"You have to understand," she said, mock-serious, "that I was a nerd. I wasn't pretty." 

Behind her back, Bruce rolled his eyes and made a gesture at throwing up both hands. Steve tried not to give anything away; either he failed, or she was just expecting it because Elizabeth tried to elbow Bruce more or less right when he moved. He dodged. 

Steve had to admit, it was hard to imagine. 

"I _wasn't_ ," she insisted. "I had acne from the time I turned ten, I had these _horrible_ big glasses, I had braces until I turned seventeen, I had short hair with thick bangs and until I moved out my dad controlled my wardrobe." She paused and added, "After I moved out, he still tried to, I just lied. Anyway."

Steve let her skip over that, from the sore subject to the story she clearly still finds amusing. "I was also a science nerd," she goes on. "I liked computers, and it was not cool for a girl to like computers back then. I liked biology, I liked getting good grades, I was raised to be _painfully_ polite and formal, and there was no music in my house except my dad's, which means I knew nothing about what my peers were listening to. I don't know if that was already a thing when you were a kid? But it was absolutely social death when I was. 

"I was," she finished, "only not a complete pariah because sometimes people were nice to me so they could copy off my biology homework. _Then_ I got bumped up two grades." 

"Best thing that happened to her," Bruce added and she wrinkled her nose at him. 

"Probably true," she admitted. "At least I was so completely outside the fold by that point that everyone left me alone, and it meant I graduated two years earlier, so I shipped off the university and my own dorm room two years earlier. It got me out of the house. And universities . . . " she opened and closed her hands like she was trying to physically catch the words. Steve waited.

"There are people who just . . .trot along in the freshman-sophmore-junior-senior world," she said. "And freshmen aren't much better than high-school kids. But there are also people who waited a few years before going, who went the opposite way of me and were held back, people who come back to school as adults - " she spread her hands. "There are grownups if you know where to find them. And grownups, by and large, are less vicious than kids." 

She wrinkled her nose. "But let's just say _I_ was not used to people liking me. Or being nice to me. And if I was _lucky_ boys treated me like furniture. Anyway. I moved into the dorm, bought a new wardrobe which, while not exactly stylish, because I knew _nothing_ about fashion, at least didn't stand out as being hopelessly frumpy, I let my hair grow out over the summer, resolved not to smile at or talk to anyone if I could help it to hide my braces and was completely stuck with my glasses." 

"They weren't that bad," Bruce interjected. "They really weren't." 

"Hush," she said. "So there I am. I am sixteen. I am being an independent young woman at university. I," she said, "am terrified out of my _mind_. And I very, very quickly discover the problem with being in a science faculty while being a girl." At Steve's slightly blank look, she smiled wryly and said, "You either get ignored, or you get hit on, or both! Except for my lab partner," she added. "On whom I pretty much developed an instant crush because he never said anything about my legs or how he bet I looked gorgeous without my glasses and he actually listened to anything I said. Ever." 

"This is apparently a rare and exotic skill," Bruce added, rolling his eyes, "and what's sad is it continues to be an apparently a rare and exotic skill. Although I'd like to point out that I could only listen to anything she said when I could convince her to talk, and I did notice the day after her dorm-mates tricked her into getting drunk so she came to the lab completely hung-over." 

"I was not difficult to trick," Elizabeth confessed. 

Steve tried to imagine Elizabeth as _shy_ \- reserved he could see, she could still be quite reserved around strangers, but it was almost the reserve of, Steve didn't know, a metaphorical princess: she was trying to decide if you were worth talking to, not afraid of you. And otherwise she was . . .well, Elizabeth. Animated and fascinated and completely indifferent to what anyone thought. 

On the other hand, he supposed thirty years is a long time to work on that. 

"Anyway," she said, waving that away. "Fast forward a year, we still have two labs together, I actually talk occasionally, I got rid of my braces, I still have terrible glasses, and it's Hallowe'en, which means there's the annual _Rocky Horror Picture Show_ screening. It's a cult classic, you go at midnight, dress up, there's all sorts of rituals about what you shout at the screen, it's a thing," she clarified, probably catching Steve's blank look. "I . . . actually have no idea if you'd like it, or if it would horrify you, now that I think about it." 

"So I ask her to go," Bruce said, "leading to what I have to admit was the most confusing thirty seconds of my life, up to that point. It has since been eclipsed," he notes. "But it took a while."

"My heart stopped," Elizabeth explained. "My brain completely turned off. I was completely and totally unable to cope. Never in a million years would I have expected anyone to ask me out. I was already planning to die alone in sensible shoes and a house full of cats. I even had the house picked out." 

"Which is funny," Bruce said, "because the dorm-mates she'd managed to make friends with had apparently been placing bets on what day exactly I was going to ask her out and, to be honest, I hadn't exactly been being subtle, as far as I knew." 

Elizabeth gave a small shrug, one palm up. "So I panicked. I said yes! And then I panicked some more, and I said, No. And then I realized I'd never told him I graduated two years early so I put my hands over my mouth and squeaked, Oh God you don't _know_ , and then I realized I sounded like a complete idiot, so I said _Oh God I'm so sorry_ , and then I ran away and hid in the ladies'." 

"I kind of maintain that this whole thing was much less of a big deal than she makes it out to be," Bruce interjected, "but I have to admit, that part was pretty odd from my point of view. And then she didn't come to class for two days. And this being well before the serious cell-phone revolution and certain people being assholes, she didn't have a phone." 

"I," Elizabeth said, "am on video somewhere in some research archive having an acid-trip where I'm convinced I'm talking to a pink and orange archangel about simian rights while we share Oreos, and _that_ is still the most unbelievably embarrassed I've ever been. Carla - one of my friends - had to literally pick my room's lock, make me tell her what happened and then drag me out to talk to him. He was very calm about the whole thing." 

"So we went," Bruce said, "and had a lot of fun, and it was fine - " 

"Actually it was the best night of my life, up to that point," Elizabeth corrected. "And then I avoided him for a week! Because I woke up the next morning completely overwhelmed with this backwash of . . . " she made an inarticulate gesture. "Emotional crud. I'd had an amazing night of not feeling anxious or stupid or ugly or like someone was about to metaphorically yank the rug out from under me, and apparently much like being drunk, sometimes you get to pay for that the next morning. I was absolutely convinced I'd made a fool of myself, and even when Carla and Beth - my other friend - managed to convince me I hadn't, I just _couldn't_ face anything. Then, of course, I was embarrassed about _that_."

"It was fine," Bruce said. "Beth tracked me down and explained a bit, and I figured hey, she's not mad at me. I can wait. Besides, she'll have to come back to class sometime." 

It had been funny at the time, and a bit reassuring. Now it isn't funny, actually, and his heart kind of aches for Elizabeth's teenaged self even if she's obviously come to where she can laugh at it - but it's even more reassuring. 

It's pretty much the only reassuring thing he has - what he's gotten out of books might explain a lot, but it's not really reassuring, makes no promises about endgames - so he plays that conversation in his head a lot over the twenty-four hours Bucky's gone completely and the following two days he's gone a little bit more than dawn to dusk. 

Every so often, Sam's remembered voice chimes in to remind Steve _again_ that recovery isn't linear. 

By day four, both story and reminder are starting to fray a little around the edges. 

 

His mom used to say, _If you don't know what to do with yourself, clean things or fix things. That way even if you don't feel even a tiny bit better afterwards, at least you've got something clean or something repaired, so you haven't wasted your time._ Steve had heard it at least once every week of his life that he could remember, which meant that when she was dying, home was always spotless - even if keeping it that way meant a couple fainting spells a day. 

And now it means that by mid-morning on that fourth day, the hole Bucky left in the wall after the first night is patched and painted, the windows are all open for the smell of the paint, everything in the bathroom and the kitchen has been extremely well-scrubbed and he's attacked the dust-bunnies and crumbs with the disconcertingly slender Dyson vacuum that Tony talked him into trying out. 

Steve's occasionally thought about hiring someone to clean, especially those times when he's let it slide for a while because he's been too tired. He always ends up at the part where if he did that, when times like _this_ hit, he'd have nothing to do. 

But he's always hated dusting and he's discovered a brand new hatred for vacuuming carpets that he can't really explain - something about the way the vacuum vibrates, or the sound it makes - so after that he goes for a walk, picks up mocha and two gigantic cookies (the mocha is Sam's fault but they are actually _good_ , even if part of Steve can't really think of them as _coffee_ ) and walks home via probably the most roundabout way possible. 

By then it's noon and the smell of paint isn't bad, but he leaves the windows open anyway, makes lunch, texts back and forth with Sam for a while until Sam tells him to stop brooding and go watch a movie and then drops onto the couch with a cookie and the rest of his mocha, heated up in the microwave, and _My Neighbour Totoro_ in the DVD player. 

Miyazaki is definitely at the top of the list of unexpected pleasures from the future, ever since someone's top-animated-movies list sent him looking for _Princess Mononoke_. By the next day, he'd ordered the rest of them. 

He's been spreading these out, because even an inferior one turns out to be amazing as far as he's concerned (although he's got _Grave of the Fireflies_ stuck on the shelf for someday, probably far in the future, that he feels up to it) and he hasn't been paying attention to release order, skipping around instead to whatever looks good when he sits down. And this one, he figures, is just about right for the day: the only downside is a sick mom, but he's okay with remembering Mom right now. 

The door opens and closes as the disc loads, to Steve's more or less complete surprise - Bucky only uses the actual front door to the condo if Steve's with him. Bucky doesn't answer his "hi" but does raise his left hand in acknowledgement before walking directly down the hall into the bathroom and out of Steve's line of sight. He doesn't close the door, and from the sound Steve can tell it's the sink filling up instead of the tub. 

The DVD menu loads, but Steve waits for a minute, and suppresses a sigh when he hears the click of the first-aid kit and the wrappers coming off sterile wipes, but not the sounds of Bucky taking out gauze or tape, which means whatever he's done to himself, it's not so bad he can't glue it closed. 

That was another pleasant surprise from the future, at least after Sharon (who had had to do quite a bit of work to pretend she was a nurse) had told him about it. There's something weirdly satisfying in gluing cuts closed. And knowing that if it's only that, Bucky can - and would probably prefer to - look after himself, Steve hits _play_ on the menu. 

He pretends not to get distracted by Bucky coming out, heading to the kitchen. The sounds that come back from there - mostly of someone just an edge past irritated getting out plates or bowls and cutlery - get pretty much drowned out by the soundtrack and Steve tries to pay attention to the movie. 

He more or less succeeds. He does notice when Bucky kicks one of the dining-room chairs, for what crimes Steve'll never know because he doesn't turn to look, and he also notices - can't help but notice - when Bucky and his bowl of whatever he's decided is acceptable to eat without being reminded come to the edge where dining and living-room meet and stop there.

There's a moment of silence and then Bucky says, " . . . it's a . . . giant grey rabbit?" And now Steve feels like he can tilt his head back to look without making anything more difficult. 

"Forest spirit," he says. Bucky looks tired, but not like he's managed to lose weight again, and the circles under his eyes are barely noticeable. He's also changed into a shirt and pair of jeans with no immediately visible holes in them, though that could be coincidence. 

After a minute Bucky adds, "And that's . . . a cat. Shaped like a bus." 

Steve starts to say that it'd make more sense if they started from the beginning again, but he realizes that actually, it probably wouldn't; that putting it together would need all kinds of context, some of it Japanese, that Bucky probably doesn't have, and realizing how much of it he doesn't have would probably be unpleasant. 

Then Bucky's putting his empty bowl down on the table and coming into the room to sit on the other side of the couch and frown at the TV anyway, and Steve cares a lot less about context or about making _My Neighbour Totoro_ make sense without stepping on cracks. 

Technically there's enough space on the couch for two grown men to sit without touching, but Bucky seems to be ignoring that. Granted there are currently big matching pillows in the way, because Steve keeps them for reasons he's kind of forgotten right now, since he hates leaning on the one that goes on this side of the couch and always ends up throwing it over to the other side to pile up against its mate, but they're easy enough to move. 

Bucky just doesn't and fills up the space between Steve and the pillows, which isn't all that much space to begin with. 

After a bit longer watching the screen Bucky says, "Emotional family drama with forest spirits." 

"Sorta," Steve agrees, because that's probably enough to go on. 

"Huh." Another minute or two of frowning and Bucky adds, "Subtitle translation isn't bad." Which Steve supposes is nice to know. 

About three minutes later Bucky apparently gets irritated with Steve's left arm where it is and pulls it around behind himself instead, without saying anything. In fact, the silence feels almost like he's daring Steve to say something about it, to ask a question or make a comment. 

Steve declines. Maybe someday, a few years from now, he'll be able to tease Bucky about acting like a prickly cat but he's not going to do it right now. He'll settle for having Bucky actually decide to sit with him and lean against him and watch a movie instead. He'll absolutely settle for Bucky actually _wanting_ Steve's arm around him, and count himself lucky, and hope the last few days are going to take the rest with them. 

When the screen's running the credits, Steve looks down to say something, except Bucky's fast asleep. Steve didn't notice because frankly Bucky isn't much more relaxed than he was when he was awake (although to be fair, while he was awake but on the couch he was more relaxed than he normally is), but Bucky's definitely asleep, arms loosely folded, back against Steve's ribs, legs stretched indifferently out beside him and head on the front of Steve's shoulder. 

Bucky smells like soap, metal and ozone, except for his hair, which smells like it needs to be washed. He's frowning a little in his sleep, but not much. After a minute, Steve awkwardly manages to pull the throw down off the back of the couch and haphazardly over most of Bucky without disturbing him, although his feet are still uncovered; it's pretty warm in here, Bucky's wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but - 

Well. Being prickly and skittish isn't the only reason Steve might one day be able to tease him about being a cat. He hasn't actually heard Bucky complain about being too hot yet, he tends to have baths hot enough to leave his skin red, and he really does hate being even a little bit cold. 

Steve had meant to do some other stuff this afternoon, but none of it's important. And even if it was, it wouldn't be _that_ important. The remote control's in reach of his free hand and he turns the volume down almost to silent and starts the movie over again, just to have something to distract his eyes while he sits, and Bucky sleeps up against him. 

 

It's just about sunset when Bucky's breath goes from slow, shallow and nearly silent to deep and full, and he shifts against Steve and blinks his eyes open. He frowns at the room and half sits up, looking sleepy in a way Steve literally hasn't seen for years. 

"You seriously just sat there all afternoon?" Bucky says, blinking and glancing at the digital time on the DVD player and around at the light in the room. "You didn't have to do that." 

Steve shrugs. "I didn't have to go anywhere either," he says. He gestures briefly at the cleaned and closed cut on Bucky's arm. "What did you do?" 

"No idea," Bucky admits. "Probably just caught myself on a landing. Didn't notice until the kid, little chocolates girl, pointed out I was bleeding. Got my knee, too, the jeans are wrecked." He looks at Steve, frowning a little and adds, "Sorry. And no, not for the fucking jeans. Smartass." 

"It's okay," Steve says, letting the rest pass because, well, there was a chance he'd've gone for the smart-aleck line there. Bucky gives him a complicated look. 

"No," he says. "It isn't. I just can't do anything about it." He says it lightly, but there's a lot of bitter underneath, so Steve shrugs it off. 

"Want to come find dinner?" he asks, and this look isn't complicated at all, just full of disbelief. 

"Did you really just ask me if I want to eat?" Bucky asks, a little sardonically, and Steve shakes his head, suppressing a smile but admitting the point. 

"Okay," he says. "Do you want to come _with_ me while I find dinner and earnestly lecture you until you eat it?" 

Bucky snorts, rubbing at the left side of his neck for a minute, and then shrugs. "Why not," he says. 

There's a lot of answers to that, actually. But Steve's not going to remind him.

******

Some things get easier.

That night around half-past midnight the impulse to leave-run-hide hits again, but Bucky ignores it, just flicks on the little adjustable light and pulls over a book (one of the damn Potter books because he's tired of tripping over the references, but so far just wants to drown just about everyone over twenty and isn't sure he's going to be able to make it through four more volumes without ripping the books in half) and reads, back against the closet wall, until it goes away. 

Then he dozes until it's light enough to give up, make a fresh pot of coffee and glare resentfully at the fridge until he decides Steve can figure out what the fuck breakfast is supposed to be, and pull out clean clothes. 

But the problem with letting your guard down is that you let your guard down. 

It's a stupid thing. A tiny thing. Water on the side of his face and his shoulder, not looking before he turned on the tap. Nothing. Nothing, that makes the world lurch sideways. And he can smell his own sweat, days of it, _feel_ it crawling on his skin and the moment, and the moment and the moment and - 

For a second, maybe, he thinks it might pass. Then he shoves himself away from the stall so hard the fingers of his left hand chip the porcelain of the tub where they hit it and he drives the side of his hip into the corner of the vanity deep enough that he notices it hurts. Distantly. Sort of. 

He makes it outside the door before he has to stop because breathing, breathing enough not to pass out is going to take everything he has that isn't being swallowed by the effort of _no_ , of not smelling stale sweat and blood and oil and the dank petrichor of underground everything, _fuck_ , no, and faces he won't, he _will not_ see, not even for a second not even in his mind God _fucking_ damn it - 

Takes until Steve's helping him sit down and until Steve's voice makes it through memory - fuck irony, fuck everything, _memory_ \- to meaning for Bucky to realize he'd dropped to a crouch, both hands pushing knuckles against his head and one side going to bruise like hell for a while, that he's off-balance and leaning his right shoulder on the wall to keep from falling over before Steve makes him sit. 

Fuck. 

Steve says his name again, enough worry in this time in two syllables that Bucky makes himself answer, take in enough breath to say, "No, stop. I'm fine." 

It's probably one of the worst lies he's ever told. But it's words, it's sense, so it means that Steve stops panicking and frowns instead, that he lets Bucky's shoulders go so Bucky can lean back against the wall and think about breathing, air coming easier now. Means that Steve'll sit down on the hall carpet-runner too, and it's easier to smell shampoo and coffee and eggs from the kitchen and eggs might be nauseating right now but for once Bucky will willingly, gladly take nausea if he can breathe. 

"No," Steve says. "You're not fine." His one hand's still resting on Bucky's left-shoulder, warm on flesh and heavy on metal; it's something more real than what's in Bucky's head and the past gives up a little and lets go of his lungs. 

"No," Bucky says. Hard for him even to tell if he's arguing or agreeing. "I just - I didn't check the shower was off. The water hit me." 

Steve's face gets the look that means he's trying not to show he has no fucking idea what Bucky's talking about, no idea how that could possibly be an explanation, and a painful laugh gets halfway up out of Bucky's chest and then collapses, just leaving bitter amusement and faint ache. 

You'd have to be much stupider than Steve not to notice he avoids the shower, and Steve never says anything about it. There's a lot Steve never says anything about. It's enough to make you want to strangle him. Doesn't say, doesn't ask. Leaves alone. 

God love Steve Rogers' complete fucking inability to think like a bastard. 

It's easier and easier to breathe. Bucky rubs his eyes with his right hand and sighs. "Think for a minute, Steve. Something you have to be around stinks and you want to clean it off fast as you can and with least effort. What do you use?" 

It takes a minute and in that minute Bucky gets a sense of how badly he sent the muscles of his torso into spasm just now, but eventually enlightenment dawns in Steve's eyes enough that Bucky can relax away from the idea of being any more specific. This is humiliating enough as it is. 

Steve puts on his _we can fix that, no problem_ face and says, "We'll get rid of that shower-head." Then he looks sharply at Bucky and says, "Don't even think about saying I could just save myself the effort and get rid of you instead. It's not funny." 

Bucky swallows past the sudden bad taste in the back of his throat. Mostly how close Steve can come to reading his mind is comforting, or at least useful, but right now his words scrape knife-on-stone across Bucky's mind bad enough that he has to talk his left hand out of clenching, out of breaking anything. Like the wall or Steve's far more fragile face. 

"You know," he says, keeps it even, "I'm officially fucking dead, which means I officially do not have a fucking chain of command, and you don't actually get to give me orders, Captain Rogers." 

Steve actually looks unhappy and chastened for a minute; maybe he caught more of that than Bucky meant him too. He looks down and says, "Okay," and then adds, like he's making an effort to shake it off, "fine, so if you do say that, I'll give you a long and embarrassing speech about why it's not true. How's that." 

"I guess I can't stop you," Bucky replies. He makes himself relax as much as he can. It's not much. He feels fucking done with today and it's barely eight in the morning and if he starts shaking in spite of everything he can do - "Don't think you could actually manage anything you haven't already said, though." 

"That a challenge?" Steve demands, only half-joking, eyes narrowing, and the look hits that space where it feels painfully familiar and yet Bucky can't find a single fucking memory where Steve wears it and he feels the fingers of both his hands curl before he manages to shunt things away from _that_ place, and it means he metaphorically falls face-first and flat on the side of things where shit seems funny that probably really isn't, and he can't help laughing a little. 

A little. Painfully. 

"Fuck no," he says. "Steve, I'm sitting in the fucking hall because I'm too fucked up to take a fucking shower. I couldn't challenge _anything._ " 

Steve gives him a long look Bucky decides to ignore. Then Steve shifts to the other side of the hall and sits facing Bucky. He says, "You remember World's Fair? Where we saw the Stark Industries demo?" 

Bucky considers actually telling him to fuck off, if the hurt look and then the solitude would be that bad. He sighs and says, "Give me a frame of reference, Steve. Stark anything doesn't exactly stick in my mind. Pretty sure I never thought of the old one as more than a flash spoiled bastard who needed his head checked." 

It looks like Steve's squashing a smile. He glances down and toys with the edge of the runner and shit, Bucky thinks, he looks young and bright and like he shouldn't have to deal with a sliver of the shit he does, and is, most of which is Bucky's fault. Not all of it. But most. 

"Night before you shipped out for Europe," Steve clarifies, "the flying car," and Bucky tries to think, shakes his head. 

"I remember you getting beat to shit in an alley," he says. "I think. Or I could be making it up, I don't fucking know, since you did that a lot." 

"You dragged me to the Fair after you decided I should be _done_ getting beat up in an alley," Steve says. "You found a girl who was willing to pretend she was interested in me. And I walked away like halfway through it to go show up at another recruiting centre and lie about where I was from. Mostly because if I did that, and you went dancing with both girls, I wouldn't have to see you off." 

Steve's arms are around his bent legs, one hand holding the other wrist loosely and he's looking at the carpet. "I, ah, pretended I was mostly mad I wasn't going, but honestly, I was kind of terrified you were leaving, too. I mean," he adds, with an attempt at levity that's as transparent as fucking glass, "who was going to save me from getting beat up in alleyways." 

"Steve - " Bucky starts and Steve shakes his head. 

"No," he says. "Shut up. My turn. I - everything that happened afterwards - " He half-laughs, still looking down at the carpet. "You have no idea how many letters I wrote," he says. "I mean, you wouldn't anyway, because half of them I didn't send because I figured they'd distract you from what mattered, and the other half went . . . wherever the Army put mail for people they figured were dead, and never came out again. I spent . . . so much time making up reasons you didn't answer. And if you don't believe me," he adds, looking up and looking wry for a minute, "there's like six ex-chorus girls at a bunch of different old folks homes who can back me up. I'm pretty sure they thought you were my boyfriend and I was lying to them when I said you weren't.

"And then I got to the front and I found out what happened and I . . . I didn't know who I was." Steve shrugs, looking at his hands. "It's not like I expected storming a HYDRA base by myself to work. I didn't. I expected to die. I just couldn't not, after you - Fuck," and Steve never swears, Bucky knows that by now with a gut deep sense, even if he doesn't remember, "Bucky, you know what? A year ago Sam asked me what made me happy. I had to tell him _I didn't know._ And I was lying. It just . . .wasn't worth saying. Because it wasn't like he'd be able to do anything but tell me I'd get past it, and not understand when I said I couldn't. That I wouldn't."

Steve's still looking at his hands, and so is Bucky: Steve's hands and his own, Steve's hands both whole and the overlapping curves of metal that make up his own left one. "You were in love with Carter," Bucky says, and he's half unwilling to say it and he has to say it anyway, because the past is something that people can rewrite and God knows he knows that. 

"Yeah, I was," Steve acknowledges, nodding. "I was rehearsing marriage proposals but - " He looks up at a point on the wall above Bucky's head. "Knowing I lost Peggy broke my heart. When I lost you I mean it - I didn't know who I was. I - " now he's looking right up at the ceiling. "Buck, when your mask came off, for hours all I could think was it meant you were alive. I could find you. Not . . . fair," Steve goes on, "pretty selfish actually but - " his eyes drop to his hands again. 

Bucky wonders how the hell they got here, from him being fucking ridiculous over a spray of water. He can't answer, he doesn't _have_ an answer because it's nuts, it's all fucking crazy and he figures Steve's going to get his heart broken again, maybe a few hundred times, trying to make Bucky whole, when there probably isn't actually enough of him left to do it with. Probably isn't enough to make it _worth_ it.

After a minute Bucky says, "You should be living, Steve. Erskine stole your life. SHIELD did. You were a fucking hopeless hero in waiting and they took hold of that and took your life away with it, and you have a chance to live, and that's where you should be." 

"I am," Steve says. Now Steve looks up, face all earnest blue eyes. Damn him. "Bucky - _I am._ And I can argue with you about this all day," he adds, "but there's probably more comfortable places to do it than the hall floor." 

Bucky sighs. His head aches now, the soreness radiating up from his neck and shoulders, not enough that he'd call it pain exactly but enough to be dull and hot and red in the back of his mind. Steve probably _could_ keep this up all day. Stupid stubborn son of a bitch. 

He rubs his forehead and says, "You're gonna to regret this," because he can't quite let it go. And since Steve's decided they're done - since that's what his crack about the hall floor meant - Bucky expects something light coming back, some deflect or dry return. 

Instead Steve says, "No." And nothing else, until the pause drags Bucky's eyes back to his face and Steve shakes his head just a little, eyes staying steady. "No. A lot of things. God knows a _lot of things_ , Bucky, but this, no." 

Stupid _stubborn_ son of a bitch. 

When Bucky doesn't answer - can't answer, doesn't have an answer that isn't just wanting to shake some sense into him and right now, he doesn't think he can - Steve gets up, leans one hand on the wall and holds the other out. "Come on," he says. "You can pick which first, food, bath or sleep." 

He gives up. Bucky gives up and reaches up his right hand to let Steve pull him, carefully, to his feet. "I don't know which is worse," he says, a second kind of reach, this one the awkward one for something like normal complaining, "you and your God-damn beds or you and fucking food." 

"I didn't say _bed_. You can sleep on the couch," Steve offers, and Bucky resists the urge to smack him, because only his left hand's free.

He lets Steve talk him into eating a little, eggs less nauseous by the time they're actually done (that is, the second pan's actually done, the first being thrown in the garbage for being a half-burned, half-congealed-raw mess), pear not quite ripe but close enough. Then Steve's fussing with something while Bucky pours himself more coffee and, after a moment of half-blank thought, digs out a clean dish-cloth and washes his arm and face and neck, on the basis that it's going to take a bit before he even wants to hear running water at any deeper pitch than a sink-tap. 

And Bucky considers _not_ , considers not doing it for a couple minutes before he makes a face nobody else can see, wanders out into the living-room and drags the throw off the back of the couch to wrap up in. When Steve's already sitting there, with a book and his plate on the side-table at his elbow, Bucky squints at him. "What are you doing?" 

"Sitting?" Steve says, as blandly as he can, which means he's trying to hide something; for a minute, Bucky considers niggling at it until Steve gives up and tells him, but then he decides, fuck it: Steve wanted him to pretend to sleep, he'd pretend to sleep. He drops himself into the two-cushion empty-space on the couch, works his feet in behind Steve to be irritating and to keep them warm, folds his arms to keep the blanket wrapped around him and rests his head on the arm of the couch. 

When he wakes up, disoriented and pushing himself up to sitting to figure out where the fuck he is and why he's there, Bucky's neck hurts and it's two in the afternoon. He squints at the clock on the mantel, sure he's misread it, but it keeps reading two in the afternoon, and his head has the groggy, sleepy but not actually unpleasant feeling of having slept that long, and Steve is looking irritatingly satisfied with something. 

"Have you noticed," Steve says conversationally, "that when I'm close, you actually _sleep_?" 

Bucky tries to think of an answer to that, rubbing at the sore spot on his neck first with the fingers of his right hand and then, when that doesn't help, the wrist of his left. Eventually he says, "I'm not talking to you about this until after I brush my teeth."

******

Bucky's arguments boil down to _I sleep like restless shit, there's no reason you should have to sleep that way too_ ; Steve's counter is basically _you've slept more or less like the dead all three times you've been using me as a pillow and/or blanket, and even if it doesn't last, you don't lose anything by trying._ Eventually Bucky resorts to throwing pieces from the peel of the orange he's grudgingly eating at Steve's head, and that kind of thing is a kind of eternal signal for _fine, you win, but I'm not going to be gracious about it, I admit nothing and we're never talking about this again._

It used to be mostly Steve doing that, and he threw things like tiny pencil stubs and crumpled up sketches, because those were usually what he had to hand. When more or less in retaliation, Bucky turns on _Game of Thrones_ , Steve rolls his eyes, tries not to smile and moves out onto the balcony to make a list of stuff he feels like he needs to get done. 

He doesn't like _Game of Thrones_ that much; as far as he can tell, it consists of decent people getting themselves killed or mangled for stupid reasons, or by being unfortunately stupid, as if somehow having a sense of honour made you incapable of understanding that other people often _didn't_ and were out to get you - or it consists of horrible people being horrible at each other. Steve can't really see, at all, what makes that interesting or entertaining to watch.

He'd felt more or less the same way about _Fawlty Towers_ , to be fair. And several other shows. 

The irony is that Steve finds their mostly unspoken disagreement about it comforting, because they've been having this argument forever, even if Bucky doesn't remember it (yet) - not about _these_ shows, obviously, but if Steve had a nickel for every time he'd rhetorically demanded why Bucky was even _reading_ this stuff (whatever "this stuff" was), it was so full of awful things, then adjusted for inflation he could probably buy a second motorcycle. 

But that doesn't mean he has any interest in watching them, even haphazardly just by sitting in the dining-room. 

Bucky insists that at some point the older living Stark girl is going to turn around and make people sorry. Steve's told Bucky to call him when it happens. And kind of hopes it does, because Bucky's clearly a bit attached, even if it's not as bad as the whole _firefly_ thing. As far as Steve can tell Bucky's watching more or less anything he can get access to - right now mostly in English, because that's what's easy to get - but a lot of it bounces off pretty intense indifference or - in the case of pretty much anything about vampires and there is a surprising amount about vampires, or most things about cops and crime - hits severe sarcasm, severe enough that you can see it even when he says just about nothing. Only the occasional show will have something that actually catches Bucky's attention: Sansa Stark here, the Tams there, sometimes more predictable, sometimes less. 

Depending on how the show goes for those characters, it can be a definite mixed blessing, but Steve's pretty much gone with Sam's take overall, which is frankly it's a miracle Bucky gives a damn at all, so he's not going to interfere. 

He's just going to go outside so he doesn't have to watch people being awful. And make a list. 

At the top of the list is replacing the shower-head: the one there now was here when Steve moved in. It worked, so he never changed it, but it's the cheapest, simplest kind and if nothing else Steve's absolutely sure he can easily swap it out for something less likely to be a problem by sheer _accident_. And while he's at it, he might as well repair the new chip and a couple of old ones in the tub, and pick up more drywall mud and paint. 

Groceries, a new set of drinking glasses and a jug. And it was probably time to at least take a look at some of the nooks and crannies in the washing machine, before the possible mildew started getting all over clothes. And - 

Steve ends up with a list of five or six things to do tomorrow, which is probably a good enough number. 

 

After supper he sticks the list on the fridge with a magnet and has a brief internal debate with himself; then he says, "Hey, Bucky. C'mere." 

Bucky finishes pouring coffee, gives Steve a dubious look, but follows him into the living-room; gives him an even more dubious look but sits down on the floor in front of Steve and the couch at Steve's gesture without arguing. It's one of those moments that put a quiet alert to work in Steve's brain, reminds him of Natasha's warning and to watch how he said things and what he said. 

But he's pretty sure if he elaborated right now, Bucky would deflect him not for any _reason_ so much as the reason he ducks pretty much anything that might make him feel better, at least the first time. 

Steve rests his hand on Bucky's right shoulder, waits for a beat and then says, "Relax for a minute." 

In an ideal world, Steve thinks, as he carefully increases pressure on the circles his thumb makes against the curve between Bucky's neck and shoulder, even if talking about replacing the arm is still off the table, they'd have found a physiotherapist, a massage therapist, any one of the half-dozen professionals the modern medical world's come up with in order to try to manage the wrecks humans can make of their bodies. But in terms of bodies, Steve's pretty sure that even if Bucky managed not to leave any dead ones, he'd be doing it at a pretty severe cost to himself, and that'd make the cure worse than the problem. 

And up until now, Steve's mostly included himself in that, but he's also figured the aversion might wear off with him faster than with a stranger, so he's looked stuff up, done as much study as he can without making a big deal out of it and now - now he figures he might not do more harm than good. 

It takes a minute; unsurprisingly the first thing Bucky's shoulder does under his hand is tense up, because he probably can't _not_ be wary of something bad coming, still. But after that minute the effect is more than Steve actually expected, and Bucky lets his head hang a little and says, "Okay, you can have maybe forever to stop doing that." 

"You know your back's a complete mess, right?" Steve asks, casually, letting his other hand go to Bucky's left shoulder given the vote of confidence. 

"I kinda noticed, yeah," Bucky says, dryly, and then sighs. "There's only so much I can do about it." 

Steve decides to take that as a down-vote for bringing up any repair, at least for now. Honestly the last week's probably pushed enough comfort zones - which weren't that comfortable to begin with - and Steve decides he'll avoid pushing his luck. 

And while Steve's not sure how much _lasting_ good he knows enough to do, by the time his hands start to protest, whatever the state of the ground-in tension, the overall sense that Bucky's wound up like a spring is down and his eyes are closed. And Steve's _still_ not going to compare him to a cat, out loud. 

"When the hell did you pick that up?" Bucky asks, shifting and rolling his right shoulder, when Steve's just been resting his hands on Bucky's shoulders for a minute. 

"Google knows everything," Steve says. "Just wasn't sure I wasn't going to make you jump out of your skin by trying it." 

"Yeah, that's not a problem," Bucky replies, like something's funny. 

 

Steve doesn't mention sleeping arrangements again; he's pretty sure he doesn't _have_ to, and Bucky proves him right by catching him in a kiss, backing him up against the dresser. Steve would say something teasing about Bucky being afraid he'd get away, or something, except he's too busy kissing back and pushing back, until Bucky's lying on the bed, pulling his shirt off. 

No better excuse, after all, for sleeping in any given bed.

*****

Steve, the manipulative little shit, is right. If it's a little bit of consolation that he doesn't sleep straight through the night, Bucky has to admit that he only woke up twice and only for a few minutes, until his eyes made sense of where he was in the dark and he tuned into the sound of Steve's breathing; then he'd fallen back to sleep.

But it means when Bucky wakes up he has about five minutes of groggy comfort before the god-damned itch under his skin starts, like even staring at an open door part of him can't believe he's not trapped; it's not as bad as it could be, but it still makes him push himself out of bed with an internal snarl and lock the bathroom door behind him before he checks to make damn sure the pin is down and hits the tap for the tub. 

Water hot enough to leave his skin red helps a little, but probably not enough; the same with food and coffee and the silence of Steve very carefully and considerately _not_ saying anything until when Steve opens the bathroom door with his hair still wet and with a second internal snarl, this one at himself, Bucky announces, "I'm going for a walk. For a while." 

Steve does his best at covering his surprise, which is about what you'd expect. Bucky knows it's the first time he's _said_ anything before going, instead of just disappearing. He knows that because he's making himself do it, because he is so _fucking_ tired of being not much more than a twisted snarl-up of reactions and impulses he can't control. 

"Okay," Steve says, then, "I'm going to go get a few things. Anything you need?" 

Bucky doesn't have an answer that won't start an argument - the top of his list is _a bullet through the head_ and it gets sharper from there - so he shakes his head and with profound effort doesn't yank the door half off its hinges to open it, or slam it behind him. 

He makes himself stay at ground level, makes himself not disappear: when people don't notice him it's because they don't actually care about a stranger in an obvious bad mood, not because he's using movement and stillness in ways that make them not look, not bother to remember. He makes himself pay attention to that, pay attention to how much people don't notice and don't care. 

It'd be easy to change that. Five seconds and they'd care a _lot_. But that's his call and he doesn't have to make it. To start with, at least, the indifference is kind of calming.

He doesn't pay attention to where he's going. Places feel familiar here and there, but it's changed so much since the memories that might or might not be there that it's pointless to even try. That way leads to shit his brain makes up to fill in the gaps, _that_ way leads to memories he can't trust. He doesn't need any more of those. 

 

The people around him, the ones that don't notice and don't care, they shift from soothing to aggravating without warning; it's hard to think of them as real, as actually existing, as more than ghosts. They hadn't been for so long, and then they were just . . .there, outside, where he didn't have to think about them, didn't have to notice. 

When the agitation of thinking about that get to be too much, he buys a coffee and turns around. The taste and the heat in his right hand gives him something to pay attention to. And he stops, sometimes, letting people ignore him completely, reassuring the parts of him too stupid to remember from minute to minute that he can even if he's not doing it right now. 

It's a skill that took a long time to learn. He remembers. More than he wants to. A lot more. 

Eventually he ends up sitting on a low wall near Steve's building, his second coffee almost gone and rapidly cooling. And he's not trying to be invisible, so he probably shouldn't be surprised when a kid-voice says, "Wow. I thought you were, like, allergic to the ground."

But he is, a little. He forgot that he knew anyone. Forgot to put the world of his days together with ideas like _school_ and _walking to and from_ , and that's why Mercedes startles him _again_ , even though he knew she was coming - that is, knew a thirteen year old child, unarmed, in deliberately-ripped-up-jeans form-fitting-t-shirt backpack, was getting close. 

Except - "Aren't you supposed to be in school?" he asks, irritably, sitting up and frowning at her. On the ground, she projects herself older than she does up on the roof, when she's more honest. Down here she's on the defensive and the clothes that are subtly too mature stop feeling like that. Down here, too, she's wearing earrings, necklace, bracelets, tinted lipgloss - but she's still got the Tinkerbell watch, like a wrong note in a song. 

"Half day," she says. "Ms Garcia let us out early on top of it. Seriously I don't think I've ever seen you not, like, up somewhere." 

Bucky finishes his coffee and says, "You're nosy, kid." 

"Yeah, well," Mercedes acknowledges, shrugging. "How else am I supposed to find anything out? Nobody talks to kids. Used to have to sneak to the top of the stairs and eavesdrop to find out what was going on with my brother or - anything," she says, with a pause most people wouldn't've noticed. "Nobody wants to tell me stuff, they think I'll get worried, never stop to think I'm good enough at knowing people I'm worried anyway." 

She looks down, self-conscious for once, like she really didn't mean to keep talking. After a minute of no response, she sits down beside Bucky and swings her backpack around. "So I kind of have a question," she says. 

Bucky seriously reconsiders writing her mom a letter, pointing out that the girl clearly needs some uncles or pseudo-uncles or _something_ , possibly a psychiatrist. "How nice for you," he says. She's pulling something out of her backpack, a book, and sits with it on her lap for a minute, her arms covering the top. 

"Can I ask it?" she asks, and looks more like the kid on the roof. She might be doing it on purpose. She's smart enough to manipulate people that well, but she's also a kid, and underneath the other stuff she's scared or she wouldn't be here, trying to figure out where the lines are and if he's really as safe as she's trying to convince herself he is, and a kid like that probably doesn't really want people to notice she's younger than she likes to pretend. 

"What exactly are you going to do if I say no?" Bucky counters. She shrugs. 

"Be sad and go inside, I guess," she says. "I mean, nobody has to answer questions, it's not like - " 

"What, kid?" Bucky cuts her off, because even if the tirade is genuine he doesn't really want to hear it. There's no way for him to know who's not telling her what right now, but whoever it is clearly needs to stop and take a look at the kid they're keeping in the dark, and then, for the sake of everyone else in the whole damn world, cut it the fuck out. 

She bites her lip and opens the book, turning it on her lap so he can see. "Um," she asks, suddenly every one of her only not-quite-thirteen years, tucking her hair behind her ear, "so we're on this unit in class, and, like - pictures, and - are you this guy?" 

Bucky doesn't have to do much more than glance at the page; he takes his left hand out of his pocket, reaches over and closes the book carefully, because her fingers are still in the way. "You are good at recognizing faces," he says, neutral. Most people aren't: most people need context, the repetition of shapes and backgrounds, and even then they convince themselves that something can't be what they think it is, if they feel like it can't be true. They stick with _looks like_ and _spitting image_. 

"Evil science Nazis?" Mercedes asks, after a pause. 

"Evil science Nazis," he confirms, still neutral. He's read a lot of the textbooks, the histories; he knows what's in them, knows the usual way the story gets told. He doesn't know how he feels about it yet, doesn't know if he even has feelings about it yet, besides aversion that could come from so many places. 

"Shitty," Mercedes says, and then catches his look and adds, "I _am_ watching my language, I picked that word on _purpose_. I'm not in school or at church or in the house, I can swear." 

"You're _twelve_ ," he says and she lifts her chin. 

"I'm thirteen in two weeks." Then she purses her lips and says, "Were you the one who ate all my chocolates last year? Because, like. Captain America started out just buying nine boxes and I kind of talked him into that because he was only going to get three, and then all of a sudden it's like cases, I mean, I wasn't gonna ask - " 

"So why are you asking now, kid?" Bucky interrupts, since it's obvious the nervous justification is going to go on for a few more minutes if he doesn't. He wonders if she realizes she's scared a lot. Probably not. If she let herself realize it, she wouldn't know what to do. 

"Um," she says. "Well, we're doing another trip and fundraising starts next week, so - " 

"So ask next week," Bucky says. "And we'll see." 

She's smart enough to know when anything that isn't a _no_ is actually a _yes_ , and also to know when not to push her luck; she heads off inside, maybe walking a little lighter than she did up the street. Maybe not. It's hard to tell. _Happy_ and _sad_ aren't things he sees unless he's looking, and even then they aren't as easy to recognize as the thousand shades of fear. 

 

When he opens the door to the condo, he smells . . . wood, glue and dust. And hears Steve singing off-key to himself, which is something (and it's one of those things he knows all at once, enough that it unsettles him, a memory he hasn't found before, a memory that isn't a memory it's just _knowing_ ) Steve only does when he's ridiculously pleased with something. 

Bucky eyes the hallway, throws the empty cup away first, and _then_ goes to look at - it turns out - the bathroom. 

Which . . . isn't, really. 

The tub is gone, the walls and floor are stripped, the vanity's gone and so are the mirrors, and there's a square marked out on the floor on the far-side of the rectangular room, where the kind of useless cupboard used to be. Thankfully the toilet's still there. 

Steve's hair has dust in it from drywall and tile-grout and who knows what; he's got smudges of something dark on his forehead and something light - it looks like some kind of paste - on his cheek, and across the t-shirt he's wearing. He's clearly been at it a while, and the gleeful light behind his eyes is just about as old as Mercedes, maybe, if you squint. 

"Hi," he says, like it just suddenly occurred to him some time has passed, and also that he didn't mention he was going to take the bathroom apart. 

"Steve," Bucky says, "only you - and I mean only you - could accidentally renovate a bathroom." He folds his arms and leans on the door frame. "Because that's what you just did, isn't it." 

Steve looks around. "Sort of," he admits, dusting off his hands and standing up from where he's been doing something to the floor over by the marked-off square. "I was going to replace the shower-head, except I found one that if you stick it in the ceiling, so to speak, it's just like rain. Which I liked. Except if I was going to rip that out, it kind of struck me that if you look at the room, it makes more sense to have the tub and shower-stall separate - " 

"And then you accidentally tore apart the whole bathroom," Bucky finishes for him. "You know, I left you alone here for _less_ than six hours." 

"Yeah," Steve says, looking around and looking proud of himself. "I got a lot done." 

" . . . .I'm going to go look at something," Bucky says, recusing himself from the bathroom renovations of people who apparently still had something to prove to themselves (to whit, that they could renovate things). "And that kid," he adds, "is going to show up next week trying to sell you more chocolate." 

"Another trip?" Steve asks, looking interested. 

"Apparently," Bucky replies, and then goes to find the tablet and the Russian-text history he'd managed to find and download, plus the headphones, so he can sit with his note-pad and leave Steve to his delighted remodelling. 

He's pretty sure that at least once, once upon a time, he found Steve passed out or at least woozy, on the floor, after trying to fix something for his mom. So if Steve feels like he needs to fix the bathroom, Bucky's not going to argue. 

 

In the end, it takes Steve less than a week and Bucky's more than willing to admit it's nicer than it was. The useless wall of mirrors is gone, and on good days he can even tolerate the straight vertical patter of the shower in its own stall. 

Steve's ridiculously proud of himself, too, which would be enough more or less whatever else came out of it. It helps to see him actually _happy_ for once.


	3. Chapter 3

Someday, maybe, sleep won't be a problem. But not yet. 

He does sleep better beside Steve, touching Steve. He can't actually argue with it. The part of his mind that fucks with him the most isn't rational or sane, and the same way it won't fucking let go of so much, it apparently doesn't need any more in the way of reasoning than _if Steve's here it's not there_ to make it shut the fuck up for maybe six hours at a time. 

But it doesn't take that long for the _rest_ of his subconscious to get used to it, or get worse, or _something_ , because it only takes a few weeks before "better" doesn't actually mean "well". Or "consistent". 

Sometimes it's dreams, sometimes it's headache or weird twinges, but something wakes him up most nights more than once, and a good half the time he can't really get back, just waits until something resembling morning manages to limp along. When he can't sleep - really can't sleep, can't even fitfully doze - Bucky makes an effort to get up, move himself to the living-room so Steve can sleep, because he knows that when he really can't sleep he gets restless and twitchy. 

Unfortunately, but pretty predictably, _Steve_ makes an effort to catch him at it and - Steve says - keep him from sitting out there for hours in the dark, alone. 

"We live right over the street-light," Bucky points out. "It's not exactly dark. I don't need to turn on the lights. Besides," he adds, "it's sleep hygiene, I'm not supposed to stay in bed if I can't sleep." 

"You know you're full of horse-shit, right?" is all Steve says, the uncharacteristic curse-word all the emphasis he needs, and this one Bucky loses because short of tethering Steve to the bed there's no actual way he can win. And even then, it's Steve. He might just bring the bed-frame with him. 

But it _is_ sleep hygiene so mostly out of spite Bucky finds the articles on it, and six or seven different pamphlets and Steve says, "Uh huh," and changes the subject. And four out of five times wakes up soon after Bucky gets up, comes out to the living-room and sits, sketching in the street-light glow, until Bucky's willing to try going back to bed. 

The fifth time Bucky ends up staring blankly or half-dozing on the couch until it's light enough he might as well give up and get up, and his head and his neck spend the day making him pay for it. Half the time Bucky suspects Steve actually wakes up those nights, too, and just stays in his room because he's trying to make Bucky admit he likes the other four nights better. 

Because honestly they're both idiots, Bucky supposes, although probably him more than Steve. At least these days. 

Tonight's one of the four, anyway, and he's up because of a dream he can't remember except for a crawling sense of horror, and it's only about ten minutes before Steve's coming out of the room and down the hall, yawning. His hair's sticking out three different ways and when he scratches fingers through it, it doesn't help. 

"Jesus, Steve, go back to bed," Bucky tries, and Steve ignores him and this time doesn't reach for the sketchpad that lives underneath the lamp on the side-table. Instead he sits on the couch and tugs at the sleeve of Bucky's shirt. 

"C'mere," he says, yawning again but still tugging until Bucky gives in and moves to sit on the floor between Steve's knees. And Steve bats Bucky's hand away from digging at the front of his shoulder, an inch or two back from the seam between metal and skin, and Bucky grimaces. 

"Do you even notice you're doing that?" Steve asks, sounding more awake and serious. Bucky makes his jaw unclench enough to answer. 

"No," he says. "I don't." 

"Didn't think so," Steve says. "You only do it at home." Then Steve rests his hand along the side of Bucky's neck just long enough for Bucky to know it's there and not flinch when Steve slowly increases the pressure under his thumb, digging into the muscle along the back of Bucky's neck. 

Bucky always feels like he should argue, or point out Steve doesn't have to do this, but he's selfish and hedonism gets in the way: there aren't a lot of things that feel _good_ , actually good, and this is one of them. Bucky's pretty sure he manages to undo all the good it does less than a few minutes after Steve stops, but _until_ then, the background headache ebbs and so does the twisted up feeling, at least where Steve's hands actually are. 

"You know you leave bruises half the time," Steve adds, as Bucky's eyes close and he rests his head against Steve's knee. He's still not sure if it's comforting or uncanny that Steve's that good at guessing exactly where to push and how hard. Or vaguely embarrassing. Or all three.

"I noticed," Bucky admits. He'd rather not talk about it, but he doesn't think Steve's going to leave it alone, and to be honest Bucky _has_ noticed the line of finger-point bruises he leaves lining each side of the join, further down front than back. On a bad week it can end up being an almost solid black and blue line, because the first set haven't healed before he's looking for somewhere else to dig his fingers and ends up in between the bruises already there. 

Push hard enough and for a while the sharp point of _that_ drowns out the other shit, until it tips over and just becomes part of it, and he has to move on to the next one. He _doesn't_ really notice it, not until he's pushing against a point of skin and muscle he's already bruised and the sensation's wrong, blends too readily with the not-quite-static. 

After a minute Steve says, "I mentioned a while ago that Dr Ross thinks - " 

" - that the connections are giving me fucked up nerve feedback," Bucky interrupts, "and the weight is fucking everything else up. I know. And I didn't actually need her to tell me, the fucking thing is kind of grafted on." And his voice is getting more edged than he actually wants, so he stops there as Steve's hands still for a second, and Bucky tries to let go of the tension he just built back up. "Doesn't matter," he says, quieter, forcing himself to relax. "I know." 

This time Steve's pressing fingers move up Bucky's neck to the curve of his skull, which is borderline manipulative considering what that does, but it feels good enough that Bucky cannot actually bring himself to give a fuck right now. Which is probably why Steve's doing it. 

"So what do you want to do about it?" Steve asks after a while, and reaches down to move Bucky's hand away from his shoulder again. 

"Problem isn't _want_ ," Bucky says. Maybe a little bitterly. " _Can_ is the problem." Which drives him fucking crazy, and only more so because it doesn't _matter_ that it drives him crazy, or that he hates it, it doesn't _change_ the panic or that panic from him can have someone's neck broken before he actually has a chance to think about it. 

"There are two sedatives that work on me," Steve says. "We found that out while I was in the hospital. In high enough doses," he adds. "Given so far we're the same with alcohol, caffeine and - " 

"Because sedation, now _that_ sounds like my idea of fun," Bucky says, tilting his head back - not that he can actually go far enough to _see_ Steve, but it gets the point across. 

"I don't think I have to point out how pain ties into the sympathetic nervous system, do I?" Steve asks and Bucky resists the urge to elbow him hard in the shin. 

"No," he says, sourly, "and you sound like a robot when you do." 

"So - " Steve prompts, thumbs pressing gently on the line of muscle that runs down from Bucky's jaw to his throat. Manipulative little shit. 

"I'll think about it," Bucky says, reluctantly, and lets Steve tilt his head over to the right, winces slightly against the pressure until he manages to make what muscles he has control of on the left side let go. 

"Okay," says Steve, which is giving up way, way too fucking easy.

 

Steve doesn't outright bring it up again. Because he _is_ a manipulative little shit - an oversized manipulative little shit, yes, but the point stands - he doesn't really have to. He just starts making a point of alerting Bucky to the fact that Bucky's digging at his own shoulder. 

Every single time. 

Which is admittedly more often than he thought. If he's not doing anything actively distracting, it's almost habit, like biting fingernails or clicking one of those fucking pens: something that happens because it's there, because it's almost a compulsion, and because in some way it's comforting. 

And Steve makes sure Bucky knows he's doing it every single time, either by saying something, or even just by absently - or "absently" - reaching over and forcing Bucky to stop. It's irritating and distracting and annoying and also doing _exactly_ what Steve wants it to, Bucky knows, which is make it impossible for Bucky to ignore how often his shoulder feels like every single nerve ending is just on the edge of bursting into flame. 

It's not exactly pain. Actually, he'd trade it for pain, _does_ , that's what digging at just beside it is _for_. Pain he can mostly ignore. 

It's almost like being blinded by bright light, except it's radiating down from his skin and up out of his bone - which, for all he knows, isn't actually bone - or like the split second between the burn and the actual pain, or like a flare static you feel instead of see, except it never ends. It increases and decreases, but it's never gone. 

And now he notices it. All the time. 

 

"I will push you off the fucking balcony," he says the morning of the tenth day of Steve's new bad habit. Technically he's picking at toast and almond butter. Really it's cold and he gave up on it a while ago and noticed he was pressing his thumb into the top of his shoulder just before Steve reached over to stop him. 

He didn't really expect the threat to help, and it doesn't, probably because four storeys makes for maybe a twisted ankle. Steve keeps almost ostentatiously reading one of the half-dozen papers he's subscribed to on the tablet and only actually looks up after Bucky's been giving him a sour look for at least thirty straight seconds. "I was - " he starts. 

"Don't," Bucky interrupts. He tears a piece off the toast, takes a bite, drops the rest back on the plate and then gets up from the table, irritated beyond what's reasonable for any of his reasons to be irritated. "I know exactly what you were doing," he says, dumping the toast in the sink-side compost bucket and dropping the plate in the sink. "And if you ask me if that's all I'm eating I really _will_ throw you off the fucking balcony," he adds, pouring himself more coffee and then going to wash and brush his teeth and find clean clothes. 

Steve's silent radiating field of Not Saying Anything manages to follow him the whole way. And just to be _really_ aggravating, by the time Bucky's done Steve's cleaned up kitchen and turned the dishwasher on, too. _And_ washed out the coffee pot and put more on. 

If he doesn't stop being so fucking considerate and helpful and quietly virtuous, Bucky _definitely_ is going to strangle him, especially since he's doing it on fucking purpose. 

It's still early and the light looks freshly washed; Bucky fills up his cup, spoons in more sugar and then goes out to stand on the balcony, lean on the railing and not-quite-scowl at the world in general. It's colder than he'd like, but he doesn't go back for a sweatshirt, and he listens to the sounds of Steve finishing with the shower and rooting through drawers. 

A breeze makes the steam from his cup stream out for a minute, and makes him suppress a grimace at the chill. He misses summer. A lot. 

"You know," Steve says, stepping out onto the balcony behind him, "you used to do this to me all the time." 

He comes to stand beside Bucky, leaning on his forearms against the railing. "I don't think I ever gave you credit for how frustrating it is to be on this side of it, though," he adds, and Bucky snorts. 

"Yeah?" he says. "Well I already knew how annoying it was to be on _this_ end, because Mom did it to me, that's where I got it from, so thanks, I didn't need the demonstration." He forces his jaw to let go and adds, "I get the point. You can fucking stop now." 

"Maybe," Steve says, neutral. 

Bucky sighs and gently pinches the bridge of his nose for a minute. It's not like he doesn't _know_ where the impulse to snarl and walk away from this comes from, what drives it, and why it's probably not a good idea. He just might end up doing it anyway. Which makes him fucking insane.

He gropes at explaining, at trying to see the shape of what there is to explain, tangled up in all the things he tries not to think about because they remind him how stupid, how fucking reckless he is to be here at all. 

How he's mostly an unstable explosive waiting for the accident that'll hit the trigger. 

Steve just waits. For a while, actually, because even once Bucky finds the shape he has to figure out how to fucking explain it to fit the space in Steve's head that'll listen. That won't just dig in and insist . . .

"There almost wouldn't be any problem," he says, matter-of-fact, and he knows he sounds like he's jumping into the middle of a conversation they haven't had, but the middle is the only place he can find. "Almost easy enough to just sit down, switch off, let anything happen, and that's right there. I can get to it. I know exactly where it is." 

He looks at his coffee cup between both hands, metal and flesh, because he doesn't _want_ to know what Steve's face looks like and can guess easily enough, especially when Steve says oh-so-very-carefully, "I don't think that's a good idea." 

Bucky feels his mouth twitch, smiles humourlessly down at his hands and says, "Doesn't matter what kind of idea it is. I said _almost_ , Steve. Almost. I do know where that place is and I also know if I got - if I get close to it again, something, some _one_ 's going to die, probably just whoever's closest." 

He turns the cup around, pointlessly. "Used to do that a lot. I gave you a lot of shit about not having the bit that tells you when to give up - well it turns out I don't have it either. Trust me, that got tested," and he turns the cup again, not sure why, "over and over again." 

"Buck," Steve starts, but Bucky shakes his head. 

"Shut up," he says. Moves the cup over, shifts his arms against the railing so the edge digs into his right arm just below the elbow and does absolutely fuck all to the other. "I'm not talking about getting pissed off or frustrated and putting a hole in the wall, Steve. I do that, I know I'm doing it, might not manage not to but it's me and I know why. 

"But the part of me that doesn't know how to give up, that part - take everything else away and all it knows is there's pain and it won't stop, and all it knows how to do is . . . fuck, hit anything close to it until the pain stops, which - usually it doesn't. And," he says, having to make each word come out, so speaking slowly, "you can beat it down but you can't cut it out of me, _believe_ me they tried - they might not give a shit about people in and of themselves but the people I was killing tended to be expensive." 

He flinches away from Steve's hand on his low back until he, until _all_ of him including his skin remembers that it is Steve; he straightens up a bit, leans on his hands instead of his arms and doesn't pull away when Steve moves closer or slips his hand under Bucky's shirt so the hand on his back is skin to skin. 

"If it feels," he says, still feeling like he has to pick each word one at a time, "like I'm going back there, I don't know how much control I've got, Steve. And don't be . . . fucking stupid, about me not being someone who could do that - if I lose it, if I don't know what's going on, I can and I will." 

"I wasn't gonna say that," Steve tells him, quietly. 

"Good," Bucky says. "Sometimes you can be an idiot like that." He rubs his forehead with his right hand, tries to talk his body into letting him properly fucking inhale. "I'm not really into beating anyone to death by accident, but I _really_ don't want to do it to someone you care about, Steve. So when I say I don't know if I can do this I don't mean I don't want to, I mean I don't know if I _can_ , without doing that. And I don't think there's any sedation strong enough that _that_ won't burn it off about the fucking second I start feeling out of it." 

Steve moves his hand to wrap his fingers around Bucky's hip and pull him carefully over, and it puts Bucky's left arm against Steve's side between them, like an unacknowledged comment. 

"It's up to you," Steve says. "I mean, yes, I kind of want you to _know_ what the messed up is actually doing, not ignore it until you forget it while you end up black and blue because of subconsciously trying to get it to stop," and Bucky covers his face with his hand, trying not to let the ragged laugh out because it'll get out of hand, "but it's yours, and it's your choice." 

Bucky manages to push down the laughter, takes a breath and parses what Steve actually said and drops his hand. "I fucking hate it when you do that," he says. "Where did you learn that fucking trick?" 

Steve briefly radiates innocence and tries, "I don't - " 

"Yeah, you fucking do," Bucky says, folding his arms but not pulling away. "I mean when you fucking back off so I'll move in and you know it." 

Steve drops the pose and says, "Actually, Dr Ross. I asked her about it once. She says people make better decisions when they don't feel trapped." 

"Jesus," Bucky sighs, "where do you find these people." The static-feeling at his left shoulder pulses loud again and he catches himself before he unfolds his arms. 

"I just show up and there they are," Steve says. "Kind of like this kid way back when." 

It's an invitation to joke but Bucky can't quite reach that, not right now; after silence for a bit, Steve says, "Elizabeth told me before anyone could do anything, she'd want a good look at what's there - she doesn't trust what they've got to be accurate enough to risk even a mock-up. That'd mean a scan and some checks. Don't . . .choose now," he adds. "I don't want you to say yes just because you're tired of talking about it. Just think about it." 

Bucky laughs, short and low. "You think I'm going to be able to think of much else?" 

 

And he isn't. Not really. 

He doesn't . . . think about his left arm that much. It's there. It works. He knows how it works, the things that it's good for, and the things that it isn't. What it'll break. It feels pressure, but no heat or cold, no pain - it's not the arm that ever hurts, it's the _rest_ of him. The scar tissue that forms the seam between metal and skin itches sometimes, gets irritated or inflamed. Without the half-glove, the metal slips against everything. He's not even sure what kind of fucking metal it _is_. 

Mostly, it's just there. Except now he can't _not_ think about it. Can't not notice how the nerve-static grows and then ebbs, or how he can feel the muscles in his back compensating for the weight. And can't not remember . . . some things. Or notice how much the fucking coffee grinder sounds like a bone-saw. 

Steve lets the whole subject be; he's started frowning at home hardware catalogues like the bathroom wasn't enough and now he wants to do the kitchen, and paint, and God knows what. It's just a lifetime of risking a fainting spell by climbing up on a ladder to change a light-bulb, Bucky knows. Wonders if Steve notices how many of the things he does now he could trace back to that, back to fighting with what he couldn't do before. 

It's been almost a month when Steve glances up at Bucky from where Steve's measuring the trim in the room and says, "You're doing it again." 

"I know I am," Bucky replies, but doesn't actually stop. Finds the bright point of pain, first, sending the rest of the buzzing static quieter for a minute that ends way too fucking soon. He sighs, lets go, leans his head on his right hand, elbow on the dining-room table. "Fine," he says. "They can look at it. As long as you make sure they know what they're getting into." 

"Okay," is all Steve says, and part of Bucky's not sure _Steve_ knows what he's getting into. But it doesn't really matter.

******

Texts are too awkward and given Steve still holds to his personal rule on talking about Bucky where he can hear, Steve spends a lot of time typing emails over the next week. And since he knows how Elizabeth, at least, stuffs her own schedule, if he lets himself think about it there's a slight tinge of guilt about how fast that schedule clears.

 _Thank you,_ he tries to make sure he says at least every third email sent. And always gets back, _Of course_. 

With Tony Steve feels less of that twinge, because he has a shrewd idea that at least part of Tony Stark is ecstatic at getting a chance to look at the tech involved; and then he has another one of those moments where on reflection Tony _shouldn't_ startle him, but does. 

_I'm going on the assumption that more windows is better,_ Tony sends. _The actual mechanical stuff needed is pretty minor, so I'll clear out one of the outside offices that has two doors. The one time he was HERE lack of exits seemed to bother him._

It makes Steve blink at the screen and because that's only one part of an email that needs a lot of answers, he digs his phone out of his pocket and texts _Bucky came to the Tower?_

_yup_ replies Tony, who's a lot better about things like grammar and readability on email, _back in summer. not 100% sure why. kind of suspect subconscious need for threat analysis. really was not comfortable in my workshop._

Steve glances at Bucky, who's watching something in Russian where the dialogue's still way, way too fast for Steve to follow, and considers asking about it. He decides not to. And actually Tony's probably right - in terms of threats, there's Tony, Thor, Bruce, Clint and Natasha, if you're really honest; Clint and Natasha are the kind of thing he'd already know, Thor's on the other side of the country and the Hulk . . . well, any threat assessment of the Other Guy is pretty much "nightmare". That leaves Tony Stark and his machines. 

The day mostly depends on Elizabeth: Tony tends to reserve the right to clear his schedule at a moment's notice, because he's Tony and only cares when he's decided to care, and Steve and Bucky have an open life, at least when it comes to this. So when Elizabeth tosses a day less than a week later, that's what they go with. 

Bucky acknowledges when Steve tells him with a small wave, and then turns up the volume. Steve can catch maybe one word out of every twenty. 

 

And there's no surprise to either of them that as the few days pass, Bucky gets quieter and sharper, sleeps less and less. Steve knows there's not much he can do about it, either, except be calm and try to think of things that'll come up before they do, so he's got some way to deal with them. 

 

The night before, Steve wakes up because by now, he's pretty much trained himself to do that when he's in bed alone. It's pretty easy to tell, actually: if Bucky isn't actually touching him, somehow, even if it's just one ankle crossed over one of Steve's, Bucky isn't in the bed.

Steve sighs and rubs his eyes with one hand. It's not like he expected Bucky to sleep well tonight. Or at all. He pushes himself up on one elbow, yawning and getting ready to go back out to the living-room.

And stops.

Bucky isn't in the living-room. He's crouched by the door, against the space of bare wall between the extra dresser and the doorjamb, pulled in and curled in on himself, hands protecting his head.

Steve almost gets his legs tangled in the comforter getting out of the bed. Bucky's done this before, sort of, something like it - ended up on the floor or crouched against a wall in the effort of trying not to lose himself, his place in time. But that comes with anger and frustration and if Bucky's usually exhausted and a mess by the end of it, even in the moment it looks like a fight. A fight with himself, with his own brain, with the past and the memories he fought so hard to get back in the first place, but still a fight.

He's not like this, huddled in and - Steve finds out when he gets to him - shivering.

And he doesn't flinch back from Steve so hard he ends up falling over hard on the floor, landing on his hip, left arm raised to protect his head and his face turned away. For a minute Steve can only stare, brain suddenly slow and stupid. He lets himself down onto the floor, too; Bucky doesn't move, his breath fast and shallow. Steve can see just enough of his face to know that his eyes are wide and afraid.

Steve hasn't seen this before. Maybe, he thinks, just because Bucky spent so much of that first while behind a closed door or away on the roof and Steve never followed him. Or maybe something else, Steve doesn't know, can't really know right now but it feels like someone stabbed him.

Even before when he's seen fear, when he'd seen terror on Bucky's face it hadn't been . . . like this, there'd always been something angry or at least something resigned, that said he'd take what was coming and endure it till it was done. And Steve'd thought that'd been bad, and it had been, and then there was, there is -

This. Without it. And the way his arm falls a little bit, the way his eyes move like he's waiting for the threat to come into peripheral vision but doesn't dare turn his head. And for a minute it's so wrong and so new that Steve's at a loss and frozen.

Until half of him metaphorically kicks the other half in the head, _hard_ , and he reaches out to put his palm gently against Bucky's raised arm and guide it down. The metal's cool to the touch; Bucky's been here a while, long enough for it to completely lose any borrowed body-heat, and he's been still enough that it didn't generate any of its own. He stops breathing until Steve lets him go, and then again when Steve quietly says his name, but he only turns his head a fraction.

"Bucky," Steve repeats, a little louder. And he doesn't like the repetition, doesn't like the deja vu, it leaves a sick pit in his stomach but he says it anyway, reaches out to touch the top of Bucky's shoulder and says, "Hey, it's me. It's Steve."

Bucky blinks and turns his head, turns to look; he's pale already but for a second he goes paler and looks worse and says, "Steve - Steve no, you have to get out, you have to - "

He stops before Steve can say anything. Seems to see Steve, see the room for the first time; the fear doesn't go, just adds confusion and Steve slides closer even before he can think about it, this time reaching out to the side of Bucky's neck, his face. "Bucky," he says, "Bucky, look at me."

It takes a minute, but he does, still like he doesn't believe what he's seeing; Steve says, "It's okay. You're safe - _we're_ safe," he amends, as Bucky's right hand touches his wrist, confusion maybe edging panic back a little, "we're home, it's okay." 

He's not sure Bucky understands any of what he says, but he is sure that if Bucky doesn't it's not language that's the problem; he slides the rest of the way over to lean into the corner between dresser and wall and says, "C'mere, Bucky, it's okay; I don't know what you saw but it's not real, this is real, I'm real, you're okay."

Steve remembers months ago he'd seen Bucky looking like a lost kid and hated it; now he'd trade _this_ for just "lost" in a heartbeat.

Bucky lets Steve catch his right forearm, pull him over; Steve's _not_ sure how much he understands right now, doesn't think he actually _believes_ any of it, but he lets Steve pull him close enough for Steve to put his arms around, to get Bucky to lean against him. It means Steve can't see Bucky's face anymore, but Bucky's right hand grips Steve's forearm hard and doesn't let go while Bucky half curls up again. 

He's still breathing fast and shallow; Steve can _feel_ his heart racing under his ribs and can still feel him shuddering. Steve moves his free hand to rest on Bucky's shoulder and says, "You're okay," again and feels like maybe he's telling himself more than he's actually telling Bucky. 

There's stuff Bucky doesn't tell him. Won't tell him. Refuses, except at most in the roundabout way he talked about it on the balcony. Steve knows about the cryo, the chair and what it did, but even there what Bucky will tell him is sparse and terse, and anything else around it stays completely unspoken. 

_It has to be in my head,_ Bucky told him one of the times Steve tried to push. _The fucking hell do I want it in yours._ And it's Bucky so it's hard to know exactly how much of that _is_ him being protective like that, and how much of it is not wanting Steve to even be able to imagine how low HYDRA took him. It could be either. It could be both. 

Not that it would change a single fucking thing, except to make Steve regret even more that he can't _get at_ anyone, that a missile burned the last remnant of Zola away, clean and quick, that Pierce is dead and out of Steve's reach. 

It's just Bucky. Five minutes off the table in Zola's first little Hell-pit, and he insisted on walking on his own; the next _day_ he was awake when Steve was, glued to Steve's side. So there are things he wouldn't tell anyone if he could help it. And won't. 

Steve can't say he'd be any better, if it were the other way round. Hell, he knows he _wasn't_ , decades and decades and at the same time all of a handful of years ago. Now might be different, now he might know better - but probably not. 

He keeps his head away from the bitter thought trains, the ones that twist back in and around and ask things like _after fifteen years of him saving your neck, where were you when he needed you_ \- because the same as it was a year ago the answer is _I'm here_ now _so shut up._

Steve's got no good idea about how much time passes. Bucky's left arm warms back up against Steve's chest and the front of his shoulder, and Bucky's shuddering lapses into spasms and then stops. It takes longer for him to start breathing slower, but he does, eventually. Steve's right leg slowly goes half to sleep, but he ignores it. It's not important. 

He thinks for maybe half an hour just before the light starts turning grey that Bucky falls asleep, or almost asleep, or whatever you call it when the mind shuts down from sheer exhaustion; by the time it's light enough to see, though, Bucky takes a deeper breath and says, "I'm fine. You can let go," sounding more like himself. A beat-to-Hell himself, but himself. 

Steve starts to, hesitates and then says, "Was that a 'let go, I want you to stop touching me', or 'this is making me feel pathetic so I'll make it sound like this is an imposition on you'?" 

And in the silence that answers, Steve says, "Yeah, I'm fine, Buck," and shifts just enough that his right leg lights up with the fire of renewed blood-flow and otherwise doesn't move a damn thing. 

"You're not actually supposed to fucking ask me that," Bucky says, sounding tired but resting his forehead against Steve's shoulder. 

"Tell you what," Steve says. "I'll go back to not-hearing unspoken secrets and not pointing them out if you tell me what happened." 

Bucky gives a minute shrug. "Nothing to tell," he says. "I woke up with my head in the wrong time and place and it turned out to be hard to shake, that's all." 

"Not what I meant, Buck," Steve says, mildly, and this time Bucky's silent for a long time before he lets go of his breath. 

"What do you want me to say, Steve?" he asks, quiet. "That they beat me and starved me and when they didn't have me strapped to a table to saw up my fucking arm or shoot me full of whatever the fuck it was they stuck me in the dark and then in the cold? I don't know what got me caught up this time, nothing's separate - you want me to tell you how fucking scared I was, how much they fucking terrified me, how even after I lashed out and killed one of their precious fucking scientists I cringed because I knew what was coming?" 

He shudders, just barely; Steve closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, lets it out. 

"I want you to believe," he says, "that there's nothing, _nothing you can do_ to make the kid you used to hold up while he coughed until he threw up on your shoes think less of you, Bucky. I want you to fucking believe I _never will_." 

He swallows, stopping for a minute because he has to. Bucky stays quiet, his breath shallow and small again, but quiet this time too. Steve sighs. "I don't want you to believe it, even, I want you to _know_ it. Jesus Christ, the year I had scarlet fever you spoon-fed me while I cried about . . .whatever it was I was hallucinating about, I don't even remember. Maybe Romans." 

"That I don't remember," Bucky says, trying for wry and not really getting there. 

"You don't have to," Steve says, "I do - parts of it, and I remember Mom telling me about it when I got well enough to sit up." He pauses and then adds, "I want you to know you don't have anything to prove to me. Jesus - you're _here_ , you came back and you _stayed._ " He shakes his head a little. "You knew me, you saved my neck _again_ , and then you came back and you stayed. Believe me, Bucky, we moved past _proved_ and into _awed_ a long time ago." 

After another silence, Bucky says, "I also stabbed you, shot you three times and then beat your face half in," because he wouldn't be Bucky if he weren't stubborn about things that don't need being stubborn over - and would probably say the exact same thing about Steve. 

"Funny how even though I know you can shoot just fine with either hand, you kept missing my head," Steve counters. And Bucky doesn't have an answer for that one, or at least not one he's going to say. 

They sit for a while and Steve thinks maybe something got through, or maybe it's wishful thinking telling him that some of the wire-tight in Bucky's body lets go. Eventually Steve says, "I should call the Tower, tell them we'll have to pick another day." 

"And do this again some other night?" Bucky says, with a minute shake of his head. "Or better, do it every night between now and then? That's not going to get better, Steve. If anything it's going to get worse. Fuck that." 

Steve looks down, not that he can see Bucky's face, and tries to tell whether or not he should be arguing. "You sure?" 

Bucky pushes against him to sit up and Steve lets go so he can. "Fuck, why not," he says, pushing his hair back out of his face. "Not like it's going to ruin a good day."

*****

Splashing his face with cold water and drinking two cups of coffee goes some way to making Bucky feel like at least something alive instead of something dead, even if "human" still feels out of reach. He decides against breakfast on the basis that while throwing up is a surprisingly effective way to feel human, it's not the kind of human he wants to feel.

Steve eats, and tries and _completely_ fails not to look like an anxious mess who's working really, really hard to keep from hovering. And then he frowns at his phone as he catches up, worry-line etched in deep and one step away from a scowl. He takes a breath, hesitates, puts his phone down, looks at Bucky for a second and then says, "Pepper says they got unexpected visitors late last night - Dr Foster and - " he sighs, "Thor. Are you s - " 

"It's fine," Bucky says, mostly staring into the middle distance of the space between him at the table, and then looks up in the pause and shakes his head, reaching up to rub at his temple with his right hand. "Seriously, Steve, do you really think I give a shit about two people I don't know?" 

Steve makes a brief _fair enough_ gesture and gets up to put his dishes in the sink, and Bucky gets a small and completely petty bit of satisfaction that _he_ only ate half his breakfast, when it came to it. He'd follow it up with a moment of disgust at just how petty that is, except he's too - 

Tired isn't really the word. It should be the word. It isn't. Detached is a better word, distant, and as he hears the shower start he remembers how and why that isn't a good thing. He tries to pay attention, to _drag_ his attention out of wherever the fuck it is - nowhere, really - and back to himself, to the way his skin _almost_ itches, but like it's a half-inch below the surface; how easy it would be to just sit here and lose track of the hours until something forced him to pay attention or his head slipped the wrong way through time again. 

He pushes the coffee-mug away, leans forward and scrubs at his face with his right hand, elbow on the table. Tries to figure out if he is being fucking stupid and indifferent and tired enough to set himself up to kill someone. 

Keeps getting distracted by things like light and a car outside and the sound of water in the pipes feeding to the shower - 

It takes a minute of that one sticking like a skipping record until he pushes away from the table and gets up, pulling his sleep-shirt over his head on his way down the hall and throwing it in on the bedroom floor, pausing to strip off the sweats and send them after it before he pushes open the bathroom door. 

Steve blinks startled big eyes at Bucky when he pulls open the shower door; Bucky figures he's probably pushing his luck with the water but he doesn't actually give a damn, is more interested in pushing Steve back against the tile and kissing him as hard as he can, as long as he can before Steve gets the brain-function back to worry and overthink and do what he does, which is pull back. 

But it's less than Bucky expected, and Steve only murmurs, "Are you su - " before Bucky pulls Steve into another kiss to stop him because less argument is good but none would be better. A lot better. Best, even. Where Steve's hands fell and where they move, Bucky's skin is already more awake, more alive and it's _not_ enough, not by a Hell of a ways. 

"Just shut up and fuck me," he says, his mouth brushing Steve's, and knows from the way Steve's breath hitches that'll have the desired effect. 

 

At some point when he wouldn't rather skin his own hand than talk, Bucky notes to himself, there's going to have to be a conversation that more or less boils down to _for the love of Christ, his mother and every asshole that ever followed him around, exactly how much_ does _it take for you to believe someone wants you, yes, now, tomorrow, when the fuck ever_ with a possible sideline into _only_ you _would have a problem with this by this point_ and maybe a highlight of _Jesus_ fucking _Christ if I don't want you to touch me_ you'll know _stop fucking worrying about it._

But right now, he would rather skin his own hand, and doesn't really have the energy for exasperation anyway, even if he doesn't feel like a ghost moving dead flesh around anymore. He also doesn't have the energy to deal with feeling cold, so he pulls a t-shirt on over the tank and a hooded sweatshirt on over that, and makes a note to make Ross turn the damn heat up in whatever room they end up using. 

Which he's not thinking about. Not yet. 

When he realizes how many knives he already has on him, Bucky makes himself put all but three back, reminds himself that he's trying _not_ to kill anyone today, for fuck's sake. And as he drops the last of the ones he's leaving onto the dresser Steve takes an edge off the looming Conversation by coming up behind him, clearly visible in the mirror, and curving one arm across the front of Bucky's shoulders, one to the other, and resting his forehead against the back of Bucky's head. 

Bucky closes his eyes, sighs and says, "I'm not saying we should put it off. And I don't want to talk about that. I'm just warning you, there is no part of this that isn't going to be shit." 

"I know," Steve says. He looks up, to meet Bucky's eyes by way of the mirror, and says, "Probably worth it." 

"Yeah, we'll see about that when it's over," Bucky counters. Steve's arm runs across his chest, just below his collar-bone, shoulder to shoulder: on the right he can feel warmth and the cloth of the t-shirt under the sweat-shirt moving against his skin; on the left he can feel pressure and only light pressure at that. "Fuck," he says. "Let's go."

******

Knowing Bucky's been here before doesn't do _much_ to put a dint in the extent of Steve's worry - but it does do a little. It means the whole tangle of someplace completely new gets taken off the pile of things that might be a problem, that Bucky knows what the place looks like and how it works.

Steve doesn't recognize the guard minding the secure elevators today, but they're both recognized and greeted. Steve shoves down the irrational twinge of displeasure at the difference between _his_ greeting by a rank that is not, formally, his anymore, and Bucky's as only the standard _Mr_ ; it belongs somewhere else and a long time ago, and is kind of childish at that. 

When JARVIS says, "Good morning, sirs," as they get in the elevator Steve shoots Bucky a sideways look, but Bucky's face hasn't really lost the very faint look of dark, resigned amusement since they left their building and all things considered probably won't unless and until he gets upset. And JARVIS greeting doesn't seem to bother him, or make him react at all, except for one brief glance up at the corner where the roof of the elevator meets the wall. 

The guard told them "everyone" was in one of the lounges on the east side, a room full of comfortable chairs, a few scattered tables and some tasteful (shockingly enough) plants with a high ceiling, where anyone who worked within a few floors in the Tower who actually took coffee or lunch breaks _outside_ of their offices or labs could be found talking quietly or reading a book. JARVIS gives them more precise directions but once they're within a couple dozen feet, in spite of thick doors, they could just follow the sound. 

Nobody was reading a book in this lounge. Nobody could possibly hear themselves _think_. When Steve pushes the door open and they step inside, Bucky says, dryly, "I think we found the Shouty Brunet/te Scientist Society's debate club." 

Steve has to work to suppress a smile. It's . . . not inaccurate. 

There's a rough circle of armless, modern-looking padded chairs around a wide circular table a touch higher than a coffee-table but lower than a dinner-table, and nobody's sitting on them. Bruce is almost sitting on the table, Elizabeth has one knee on it to lean across to the paper that as far as Steve can see is what everyone's yelling about, Rhodes is just leaning on one hand, and a tiny ivory-skinned woman with dark hair is tapping her finger on the table to emphasize what she says. 

Tony, unsurprisingly, isn't _still_ , moving from one position to another to get closer to whoever he's arguing with. And every single one of them is trying to talk over the others. 

Steve makes out, "But no, the theory states - " and then Tony derisively announcing, "I exploded that last - " and then Rhodes countering, "You haven't exploded _anything_ , you've barely chipped some - " and then Bruce saying, "Wait a minute - " 

The only person in the room not actually shouting is Thor, sitting on one of the reversed chairs and leaning his forearms against the back of it, looking delighted and amused at the same time. Bucky shakes his head about the time Thor spots them, and steps back. 

"You get them to shut up," he says. "I'm finding a bathroom." 

Steve hesitates and Bucky rolls his eyes. "Stay," he says. "I think I can find a fucking bathroom myself." And he heads back out of the room to the hall. 

Steve mentally translates that: the room is loud, unexpectedly full of loud people, all but one of them more or less strangers and two of them completely new, and Bucky pretty clearly doesn't want to combine that with a direct introduction to Thor, who's gotten to his feet and crossed the room, because it's liable to lead to conversation while the others finish shouting.

Steve gets that.

For his part, Thor looks much, much happier than the last time Steve saw him. It's the first and most striking thing Steve notices. Technically he's wearing ordinary clothes - what Steve thinks of as ordinary clothes - but Steve's not sure that actually helps to make him less conspicuous: he still moves and stands like himself, which is like someone very carefully making sure that you _don't_ think he's laying claim to everything around him, because otherwise you might think he was, and that would be incredibly rude of him. 

Steve doesn't think there's much in the way of actual royalty on Earth who could manage that, and that's about as much as he has time to think before Thor clasps his forearm and claps him on the shoulder. 

He has, at least, learned to pull his friendly gestures. 

"My friend!" Thor says, as Steve matches his grip and smile, and then they both let go. "We heard you would be coming. I apologize if our unannounced arrival interfered with your plans." 

He's got a slightly better grasp of idiom, too. Steve smiles and shakes his head. "Not a problem," he says, and then indicates the argument; from in the middle of it, Elizabeth glances up, sees Steve and then holds up a finger to tell him she did before focusing on Bruce again. "What's the problem?" 

Thor follows Steve's line of sight - to start with. Then _his_ gaze goes right to the woman Steve doesn't know - Jane Foster, he assumes. "Truth to tell I am not certain anymore," Thor admits. "It began with propulsion in vacuum, but I lost the thread when the argument veered onto the subject of a film I have not seen, and I'm not sure where they've got to by now." 

And Steve's not sure you could find any other man quite so clearly delighted to sit and watch someone else be animated about something. 

Behind Steve, the door opens again to let Bucky back in. 

"No, you're not," Elizabeth's voice says, suddenly a bit louder than the others; then suddenly she's put her pinkies to her lips and _everyone_ winces at the shrillness of the whistle. 

" _Ow_ ," Bruce protests, putting one hand protectively to his ear. " _Ow_ , Betty. _Ow_." 

"Sorry," she says, putting an absent hand on his shoulder, "but you'll live - _no_ , you can't have R-block, _I'm_ using R-block." 

Tony spreads his hands, looking innocent. "Quick job," he says, "in and out and cleaned up in - " 

"No," Elizabeth says, firmly; when Tony opens his mouth again she repeats, " _No_. Seriously I can do this for hours. No. Besides, you and I have something to do." She turns and smiles at Dr Foster. "Sorry, Jane." 

Foster straightens up, wide-eyed and says, "Oh, God no, _I'm_ sorry - " She runs a hand through her hair in what looks like a nervous gesture, readjusts her long sweater as she looks up and ends up holding the throat of it closed and hurrying over with what is definitely a nervous smile. "Hi," she says, when she gets to Thor's side, where she more or less comes up to his shoulder. "I'm Jane Foster. Sorry we crashed your party." 

She holds out one hand, and Steve takes it in a slightly more careful grip than normal. "Steve Rogers," he says, as if she doesn't already know. He nods to Bucky and adds, "This is James Barnes." 

Bucky stands back out of range, both hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt, and more or less acknowledges the introduction before looking pointedly at Tony and Elizabeth; Elizabeth's already pulling Tony forward by the sleeve and saying, "Who we unfortunately need to steal. Bruce can help you if you need anything, alright?" 

"Thanks, dear," Bruce says dryly, and she beams at him and tugs Tony out of the lounge. 

Bucky gives Steve a look that says, very clearly, _All your friends are crazy_ and follows them; with a wave of good-bye to Thor and Foster, so does Steve. 

 

A lot of thought's gone into today, about half of it Steve's - that is, almost all of the beginning thoughts, all of the problems. 

The first of them being, nothing's going to be _good_. There's no option of things being good, or even okay. The highest possible bar to hit is _neutral_ , a however-long-the-diagnostics-take span of time as forgettable and boring and mildly intrusive as it could possibly be, and that'll probably be completely out of reach. 

There's no positive. Just an attempt to make the negatives approach zero. And they probably won't. 

It'd been funny, in that way that isn't funny at all, how _disloyal_ he'd felt, sharing what he had to, up to and including _you can't expect gratitude, graciousness; it's probably going to take everything he's got to come in the first place, a huge part of him doesn't_ want _any of this, he's probably not going to be able to say thank-you to the people doing it._

Elizabeth had given him an understanding look and nod. Tony'd given him a look that pretty much shouted _no, really? And is the Pope still Catholic?_ do _bears shit in the woods?_

Steve hadn't decked him. 

(Sometimes - generally during bad weeks when he's overtired and ready to laugh at just about anything - he considers setting himself up a reward system of gold star stickers: _still did not deck Tony Stark_. Maybe there should be cookies.) 

Other things left him feeling almost as defensive, just in different directions. And he is almost completely certain Bucky wouldn't care, doesn't care, but Steve does. It takes a lot of effort not to stick warnings and even threats on the edge of each necessary revelation, because every time he says _this is a problem_ or _that's a problem_ what he's really saying is that this scares the shit out of Bucky and it's hard, _really_ hard, not to add _and if you ever, ever use that -_

He manages it, but it's hard. 

Well. He manages not to _say_ it. God only knows what's there for people to see. 

The result is a room that looks as unlike a lab as you can get and still have the necessary computers and equipment in it, with a low blue chaise for Bucky to sit on instead of anything like a chair. 

(That detail gets Steve a sardonic look; Steve merely shrugs back and looks as bland as he knows how.) 

(He doesn't expect to be an exception to the inaccessibility of grace here.) 

One wall is completely windows, facing south and getting the full sun, which makes it warm; Steve's not sure if that's something he remembered to mention, or if it's just coincidence, but he sheds his own jacket pretty quickly. There are a few potted plants, but there are potted plants everywhere in Stark Tower, of varying sizes and descriptions. It's like Tony read somewhere that plants make for a happier workspace and just ordered a couple hundred and said, "Put these everywhere," to the maintenance staff. 

Bucky doesn't say anything, just brushes past Steve to go and sit, leaning forward to take the sweatshirt off over his head and drop it in his lap, and the t-shirt after it. Steve looks around and in the end drags what looks like a mostly decorative wooden chair over to sit back to back with the chaise and drops himself onto it, leaning on the chair-back. 

Tony, for his part, is dropping several flat plastic discs around the room and muttering to himself before standing over by the side, looking up and saying, "JARVIS? Gimme," then flicking arms away from himself all the way down to his fingers. 

The translucent shapes that pop up throughout the room startle Steve; even Bucky blinks a couple times and tilts his head a little, tuning abruptly back into the world. Elizabeth just rolls her eyes, says, "Drama queen," and otherwise ignores them until Tony drags his little virtual reality show back to being within a few feet of him. 

"It's not drama," Tony says, full of patience, "it's calibration." 

"You can calibrate with a single image," Elizabeth says, "I know, I've done it." 

"I pre-calibrated for you that time," Tony says, as she hooks a low stool with her ankle and drags it over to beside the chaise. 

"Shut up, Tony," Elizabeth says, looking at the tablet on her lap and flicking through several things. "Okay," she says, "so. The reason I had to ask you here - " 

"'We'," Tony interrupts, sounding slightly miffed. " _We_ had to ask you here." 

Elizabeth looks heavenwards and continues "- is because this represents the sum total of what I - _we_ \- know about how your prosthetic is built, attached and operated." She turns the tablet around and passes it over. 

Steve doesn't think anyone else could possibly notice the split-second hesitation before Bucky takes it, and wonders if he imagined it. But Bucky does take it, turns it around and frowns at the diagram Steve saw months ago, and the other technical papers he hadn't. 

Bucky looks at it, swipes through the three pages, and then hands it back without comment. "This is at _least_ forty years old," Elizabeth says, taking the tablet, "incomplete and completely silent about either process or results for attachment and connection, which is a pretty big gap in our knowledge." 

"It hurt a lot," Bucky says, blandly, and Steve takes a quick glance at his face, trying to assess whether that should worry him. He doesn't think so. Not yet. 

"This shouldn't," Elizabeth replies, breezing as if she hadn't just been handed a barb to get caught on. Steve's kind of impressed. "You shouldn't actually feel anything at all and if you do, tell me, because something is really wrong and needs to be fixed." 

She pulls over two small tables on wheels; Bucky's eyes follow them, but Steve's watching his breathing and it's still as close to normal as it's been all morning. Might be taking a lot of effort to keep it that way, Steve knows, but so far it's fine. 

"The idea," Elizabeth says, "is to get a complete picture, so we know how it works, what it's doing, how it connects to you, everything we can. Then once we have a virtual copy we can take a look, see what we can fix or improve, all without having to bother you again until we have something interesting to share. 

"This one," she taps the thing on the one tray that looks like a cross between a mechanical wading bird and a desk-lamp, "is his," and she jerks a thumb at Tony, "and looks at the construction of the arm itself; this," and she points to a thick white rectangle dangling different coloured wires like strange thick hairs, some of them doubling back into the rectangle, some of them coiled up beside it with pads on the end, one with what looks like a plastic stylus instead of a pad, "is mine and analyses the biological end." 

She tilts her head to the side, just barely, and says, "I'm used to working with Bruce, which as you can imagine comes with some exciting possibilities, and as such my last bit of my spiel is always, if something's wrong I'd rather you tell me pretty much immediately. Makes me less nervous." 

It's actually hard to tell if she's lying, or even flannelling; from the long look Bucky gives her (and her expression doesn't change) he can't tell either. Working with Bruce Banner _could_ make you more than a bit jumpy when it came to having anything to do with someone's nervous system. 

It's just also a way of reframing things, of offering an out, that might be easier to take. And she'd do that. Steve's absolutely sure of that much. 

Eventually Bucky nods. 

 

And she _did_ say that, and Steve wouldn't've even suggested the whole thing if he thought there'd be a problem when it came to her or Tony following through on that kind of thing. 

Twenty minutes later, though, he's still kind of impressed by just _how_ immediately after Bucky's terse _"Stop,"_ Elizabeth's hands are folded in her lap, tool completely concealed by them, and she's sitting up with full casual distance - and by how completely calm and unconcerned she manages to make it all seem. 

Impressed. Relieved. And then worried, but not about her. Or about Tony, whose wading-bird-desk-lamp also folded itself back up onto the table and who is assiduously focusing on his holograms. 

Bucky's jaw is clenched and both hands are closed, but he's frowning a little at whatever he's seeing or living in his own head, which is a better sign than Steve really expected. Still. There'd be a half-second's hesitation before the word came out and Steve knows that usually means Bucky had to grope out of Russian into English in hopes of being understood. 

Elizabeth puts the stylus-thing down and glances at a small screen on the white rectangle and then asks, "Done, or a break?" in a voice that's so purely inquisitive it _has_ to be carefully controlled, Steve thinks in a distant way, because there's no way on Earth someone like Elizabeth could ever be _that_ indifferent about whether or not she gets to keep studying something interesting. 

Bucky's line of sight doesn't move; he says, "Don't know," tersely. 

Elizabeth nods, smiles and gets up, saying, "I'm going to get some coffee - anyone else?" 

"Maté," Tony responds absently, without looking up; Bucky doesn't answer, and Steve's not sure he actually heard, but coffee probably can't go wrong, so he nods and watches Elizabeth out the door. 

Then he carefully catches Bucky's right hand _before_ it can go to the skin beside the seam-scar; instead of irritably brushing him off, Bucky's hand closes tightly on Steve's and he closes his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath. 

It's reflexive when Steve bends his head to kiss the back of Bucky's hand, and tells him at least a bit of how little they've been around other people - not just that he's not checking that kind of gesture, but that he also hasn't had to think about whether he cares to, how much he cares about what they say and what other people will read. That it hasn't really even crossed his mind. 

Answer, right now: he doesn't. At all. Would actually take the opportunity for a direct, easy fight over something simple and clear, and be happy about it, except for how it'd take energy he probably doesn't have. And here it probably doesn't matter - but it's not just him, not just his choice, and he'll have to ask Bucky later, when he's more confident the answer he'll get is what Bucky actually wants and not just what he'll go along with, what he thinks Steve wants. 

Tony breaks the silence, almost like he's completely oblivious to everything around him, moving around pieces of what - now that Steve looks up - seems to be an exploded version of Bucky's upper left arm. "If anyone wants to know," Tony says, spinning something around and glancing up, "whoever designed this is basically like the engineering and bionics equivalent of Wagner." 

Steve frowns, actually thrown by the comparison and says, distractedly, "A racist eugenicist easily co-opted by Nazis?" because it's the first thing that comes to mind, although admittedly it doesn't seem to have much to do with bionic design. Tony pauses, folds his arms and looks thoughtful for moment. 

"Well - all things considered probably," he says. "I mean, HYDRA." He lifts his top arm, presenting the idea. "Stands to reason. But no, I was actually going for underlying brilliance in structure and inspiration, completely corrupted by the need to smash everyone in the face with the design equivalent of incredibly overdone noise." 

Steve forebears to comment, or even to look pointedly around the room as a stand-in for the Tower. Nor does he say anything about being surprised that Tony's that interested in Classical music. He just leaves it. 

"Fortunately, in engineering as in music," Tony goes on, pulling a handful of virtual pieces up from the bottom of his workspace and spreading them out in two directions, "we can strip right down to the theme and make something a little less bombastic - is that a hickey?" 

Steve blinks, thrown again. Tony's pointing at him, but Steve has a bit of trouble negotiating the sharp curve the conversation just took and says, "What?" 

"Mark, on your neck, by your jaw - is that a hickey?" Tony looks deeply amused. "Does Captain America have a hickey?" 

With some effort, Steve manages _not_ to reach up and put a hand over the place in question, which . . . probably does have a mark, actually, after this morning. But he's not going to dignify that with a response. He's just going to stare flatly at Stark for a minute or two before he says, "Really, Stark? _Really_?" 

Tony looks innocent, spreads his hands. "With our lives it could be a mutant space disease, I just thought I'd check. But it is a hickey, so you know, fine. You can get those anywhere, not generally contagious, we can move on back to the bombastic nature of Wagnerian design." 

The thing that keeps Steve from losing his temper - although it doesn't quite make him want to strangle Tony Stark much less - is a soft snort of laughter from Bucky on the couch beside him; when Steve looks down, Bucky's got the thumb of his left hand pressed to the space between his eyebrows like he's digging at a headache, but not hard enough to even redden, let alone bruise. He's also breathing a little bit better. 

From Steve's pocket there's a quiet buzz. He frowns, looks down, uses his free hand to dig out his phone and hits the fingerprint lock. 

The text from Tony, almost certainly sent via his current station, reads: _among things I am so certain of the error for margin is totally negligible is that no HYDRA lab ever or any other place of horrible memory has ever contained me giving Captain America a hard time over his sex life. Congratulations, by the way, I think that's the first indication from or on you I've ever seen that you HAVE one, even if by the look of things it is probably stuck in tenth grade._

Steve's touch-screen typing is a little slow one-handed, but he does send back, _you are such an asshole Stark._ It's honestly the _only_ thing he can think of to say. 

Tony limits his reply to a grinning emoticon. Steve kind of likes this phone, as it happens, so he doesn't even chuck it hard at Tony's head. 

Eventually Elizabeth arrives back with another young - actually Steve can't tell whether it's a young man or a young woman, but either way, they've still got all the signs of an intern, including the slightly overawed expression at both Elizabeth and Tony and the _rapid_ retreat once they put the takeout cups on the table by the door. 

Stark Enterprises does paid internships (which is good, because Steve would hate to have to have a pretty severe talk about that kind of thing with Tony _or_ Pepper), but the telling difference between them and the post-graduates working in the labs, as far as Steve can see, is that the interns are still overawed by the famous names and reputations they can run into in the Tower, where the grad students apparently work enough with Tony, Bruce and Elizabeth for that to wear off. 

"Thank you, Lee," Elizabeth calls after the retreating figure. "Tony, you can come get your own drink," Elizabeth adds, putting hers down on the floor by the stool, passing Steve his and then sitting down with what must be Bucky's in her hand until Bucky notices she's there and then puts together the fact that he needs to let go of Steve's hand to take it, since his left tends to be just imprecise enough on the pressure to pop the top off standard takeout cups and spill the coffee all over the place. 

Tony retrieves his cup, muttering about too much water to too few leaves, at which Elizabeth rolls her eyes and then pointedly says, "We say 'thank you' when someone brings us something, Tony." 

"What a strange and tiring custom," Tony says and is not even remotely looking at her when she turns to glare at him. By now Bucky's watching them instead of staring into space, and his mouth quirks a little bit. 

Then he takes a breath, gestures to the tables with the coffee cup and says, "Go ahead." 

 

From what Steve'd seen at the time, Bruce and Tony had over the course of an hour or three in the lab gone from strangers to fast friends, more or less whether Bruce liked it or not. Tony and Elizabeth Ross, on the other hand, act almost exactly like _siblings_ , like sister and brother, to the point where you could look at the shared hair-colour and start fooling yourself into thinking their faces have the same shape. 

And even keeping Tony's text in mind, and the (admittedly thoughtful) impulse behind it, Steve's pretty sure this is how they are all the time, even if he hasn't really seen it before. If only because keeping up _this level_ of fake bickering would be completely exhausting, where just not bothering to restrain themselves as Steve assumes - hopes - they do around other people would be a relief. 

At one point Tony throws his arms open and says, "See? This is what I have to work with." Elizabeth doesn't even look at him, frowning at whatever data is feeding into her tablet from the two pads on Bucky's arm and the stylus she's moving an inch over his shoulder. 

"I could always go work for MIT, Tony," she says, absently, and he turns around and scowls. 

"Are they trying to poach _again_? Jesus - nobody has any class anymore." And apparently _that's_ enough that Elizabeth actually stops, sits up and stares right at him in disbelief.

"Tony," she says, when he doesn't immediately respond. 

"Hmnn?" he says, blinking. 

"I don't think I've seen you make a single visit," Elizabeth informs him, "to any development facility, university or research program that _hasn't_ ended up with someone new on payroll. In fact if I asked Pepper I'm pretty sure I could find a one to one, or even one to _six_ correlation there." 

"That's completely different," Tony objects. When she just continues with a blank stare, he says, "They were _clearly_ wasted in those positions. The waste of a good mind that could be discovering and creating amazing things is a _tragedy_ Elizabeth, you've said so yourself. And," Tony adds, now looking extremely virtuous, "I happen to remember that, like, at least . . . two thirds? of the people I have hired under those circumstances are from populations traditionally disadvantaged in STEM fields, and I wasn't even doing it on purpose. Speaking of which, how is Miss Whatsername - the one who had shiny beads in her braids and almost fainted? Working okay?" 

Elizabeth's mouth is briefly at flat line before she says, evenly and sweetly, "She's a joy. I bet you can't even remember what she was actually talking to you about." 

Tony points with his stylus. "I remember you looked extremely impressed." Elizabeth throws up her hands and ignores him for all of three minutes flat. 

And that, more or less, is the entire late morning and early afternoon. Though Steve will grudgingly credit that Tony really is offended by scientific or technologically oriented minds working in jobs he considers beneath him.

After a minute thinking about that, Steve makes a mental note to drop the idea of bursaries and scholarships, maybe even funded design competitions, in Tony's ear. If the man's going to impulsively throw money all over the place, it might as well do some good. 

Bucky looks exhausted, but stays more or less looking exhausted and absently amused by the Stark and Ross double-act, as opposed to winding back up. When his first coffee's gone his hand finds Steve's again, until Lee shows up at the door saying timidly that Dr Ross had asked if Lee would come back and see if anyone wanted refills and runs off with _explicit_ instructions from Tony on how yerba maté should be made, along with a request for two coffees with three sugars and a latte. 

"You know if you were anyone else, I'd warn you that you're going to rot your teeth," Elizabeth says, "but in your case it'd be pretty pointless." 

Steve pauses to think about that and says, "I actually don't know about that - I don't think teeth get renewed, do they? They're just sort of . . .formed and then come out." He thinks. "Maybe the roots are stronger? That's the living part of the tooth, right?" 

"In that case, you're going to rot your teeth," Elizabeth says, straight-faced. Steve grins and Bucky looks faintly amused. 

At around noon the attentive Lee reappears with wraps, and this time Steve catches sight of a tattoo of two female symbols linked at the circle on the inside of Lee's wrist and so tentatively goes for _she_. Bucky manages to summon up an aggravated, put upon look for Steve when Steve hands him half of one and eats about half of that, but it's more than nothing. 

There's a brief back and forth between Elizabeth and Tony about him eating near her equipment before she chases him back to his side of the room. 

It's somewhere around three in the afternoon when Elizabeth's white rectangle gives a soft tone and the light on top switches off; Tony's bird-light had retracted to its resting position a little while before, and Elizabeth's frowning at her tablet as she removes the two pads from Bucky's forearm. "Well," she says, "obviously preliminary, but I think at this point I can conclusively say that I _hate_ whoever designed this and I would like to tie them down, stick their feet in rubber boots and pour boiling water up to the top." 

Steve and Bucky both end up giving startled laughs; Tony looks up, frowning, and says, "That was graphic." 

"Sometimes I'm graphic, you should see me with cab drivers," Elizabeth retorts. She flips the tablet around, sets it upright on her knees and holds the top so that the screen faces Bucky; Steve leans forward to get a better look at it, but frankly it's still mostly Greek to him, other than the image. "The good news is, I was right," Elizabeth says. "I can do better than this, and so can he." She indicates Tony with her free hand. "With a few weeks, considerably better than this. The good and bad at the same time news is, I was right about the neurological connections and their malfunction, which is . . .awful, but means I already have a solid idea of how to correct it." 

She cranes her head over to see the screen and flash past what look like a few different pages in some program Steve's never seen before, and then hands the tablet over to Bucky again. "The I'm-sure-this-would-be-nice-to-know-since-it's-your-shoulder news is that I was also right about something I'd guessed but didn't want to go into." 

The tablet shows a fairly simple but three-dimensional representation of - presumably - Bucky's shoulder. She taps a finger to the screen and the familiar chassis of silver metal disappears, showing instead what looks like a massive web of thin lines in the same shape; she taps a finger against those and they fade. 

"This," she says, indicating without touching, "is, obviously, your shoulder joint. Here - " and she gestures down towards the wrist where even with the filaments faded back out - whatever they were - Steve can still see the structural shape of the constructed arm, nothing like human bones, " - is completely mechanical, which continues up to here - " and she traces about halfway up the upper arm, where the structure suddenly comes together, narrows and flows into a single round anchor, " - is where what you have of humerus starts. It's completely coated in the same alloy as the arm itself, as is this here - " and she points to the space around his shoulder, spreading a little way towards his collar-bone. "Even with the biological enhancements, I didn't think human bone would take the weight, and apparently I was right."

She sits back again and says, "At this point, unless you want some extremely invasive surgeries - " 

"I'll pass," Bucky says quietly, giving her a tired, ironic look and giving her the tablet back. 

" - it doesn't matter; it's done and not likely to have any further impact on your health or comfort and means any new prosthetic can go onto an existing anchor, since that's not where the problem lies. So," she adds, glancing at Tony - who's gone unexpectedly quiet, glaring at something on his own handheld device, "unless you have any other questions, I won't keep you, I'll just let you know when we have anything interesting." To Steve she adds, "I think Jane and Thor are planning to stay a couple weeks. I may have roped her into doing some outreach with me to a couple high-schools. Just so you know." 

Bucky's already pulled t-shirt and sweatshirt back on. 

 

The door closing and locking behind them when they do finally get home seems to cut some kind of line that's been keeping Bucky going and - if quiet and withdrawn - presenting a convincing front through most of the day - one that Steve'll admit Tony being, well, Tony probably helped start and the endless not-quite-sibling bickering kept running. 

But it's been winding tighter and tighter on the way home and the _click_ of the deadbolt is the moment that snaps it, so that Bucky actually reaches out one hand to steady himself against the wall. Steve aborts the impulse to catch him or hold him up, and hangs up his jacket instead as Bucky gets his balance back and goes right to the kitchen. 

Steve pauses where he is, leans his back against the wall and takes a minute to let the feeling of being home sink in, the sense of having got through the day settle. 

Some parts of it make that hard to do. It was easy enough to ignore some of what Elizabeth said, or implied in what she did or didn't say, when the moment was more important, when whether or not they did get through it mattered more; now, world closed out on the other side of the door, it's . . . harder. 

There's nothing for him to do with the anger. That's the biggest part of the problem. Not right now, and maybe not ever, because it's possible and even likely that at this point everyone directly responsible for what HYDRA did to Bucky is dead, stolen by time or killed along the way. And there might be future threats from HYDRA to deal with, but it isn't the same. 

He's talked with Sam about this more than once, but it counts as one of those problems that just doesn't _have_ a simple solution, and if in the long term thinking it through, talking it through, finding better, more useful channels for the energy that the anger gives . . . if in the long term all of that's the best idea, and the only real answer, in the short term it's pretty much useless as Hell. 

The reasons stay the same. Will always be the same. And there's the surface flash of anger at the pain, at the damage, at the fact that they cut Bucky open and grafted metal in while he was awake to feel it all, see it all and left him with something that would hurt him for the rest of his life by its very nature, and there's a _lot_ of that. 

And then there's the deeper, much, much deeper burn of knowing why. Of knowing that they did it because they didn't _care_. That Bucky was nothing more than an experiment that worked, a body to use and that even if Zola did get a happy little fucking thrill - and he probably did - at knowing who it was he was cutting up and what Bucky meant to Steve, even that wasn't a reason, just a bonus. 

That really it didn't matter. That who Bucky was, what he'd done, what he meant _didn't_ mean anything, and in the end they just didn't care. Cared enough to reinforce his shoulder so they wouldn't have to keep fixing their tool, but not enough to bother with anything else. 

"You want some of this?" Bucky asks from the kitchen; Steve takes a deep breath and tries to let go of some of that on the exhale, knows he doesn't do very well. 

"Sure," he says, going to the kitchen to join him.

Technically what Bucky's making is truly awful coffee, a carefully tested and refined mix of two cheap instant coffees, over- and under-roasted bean (both), that somehow does manage to more or less taste exactly like what Jacques used to hover over and Monty complain about until they managed to get somewhere held by the British or near Peggy, at which point he rejoiced in tea that was, in tea-terms, just as bad. 

And it is objectively horrible, and since the only way to make it palatable was to put in a ridiculous amount of sugar or honey (though they'd all drunk it without, if they had to) and the coffee itself acidic as Hell, probably the most unhealthy non-alcoholic drink Steve could think of. 

And it's also something Steve didn't even realize he'd missed until suddenly there was a boiling coffee pot of it on the stove at least a couple times a day and if he didn't drink quite as much of it as Bucky, he still finds himself reaching for it on a pretty regular basis. 

Monty's long gone, but next time he visits Steve can in fact tell Peggy that he finally understands her terrible, terrible tea. 

They both end up leaning on the counter, coffee cups in hand, and Steve wonders if you could make a deeply allegorical painting out of it, and what he'd call it if he did. "Exhaustion" doesn't seem quite right, because the charge of anger still there means he doesn't _feel_ tired; "The Long Day" just too expected. He turns the idea over in his head for a while, until he sees Bucky take and let go a deeper breath and look up. 

And then reach over and tap the side of Steve's neck, just by Steve's jaw, with his thumb. And look amused. 

Steve ducks his head away, just slightly, clearing his throat and putting his now empty coffee-cup down. Bucky looks even more amused. "Your face was pretty funny," he says, and Steve tries to grimace but kind of suspects it comes out more than half a smile. 

"Really I don't know why I have anything to do with him, sometimes," he says, which is a lie. "He wouldn't know common courtesy if it hit him in the face." 

Except apparently it was funny enough that there's a little light in Bucky's eyes again - tired light, but still there - so actually Steve might owe Tony a mental apology. Which is so completely Tony Stark it could make you sick. 

"I could always stop doing it," Bucky says, blandly. 

"No," Steve says, and a really clever person would have said it as fast as he did because they were _trying_ to play up the moment for comic relief, but in Steve's case, it just blurts out like that. "No, that's okay." 

Bucky laughs at him and reaches over with his right hand to mess up his hair. 

 

They order Chinese, watch mindless TV and both pretend they're not counting down until it feels reasonable to go to bed - both, which is unusual, but Bucky really does look that tired. At seven, Steve shakes his head and says, "This is ridiculous," and stands up to go brush his teeth. Bucky follows, a little mechanically, and Steve notices that he's avoiding looking at the mirrors again. 

Which has to be the day catching up on him. And Bucky hesitates, briefly, at the door to his room, covered with its timeline pinned to every wall and still with the bed they both know he's never slept in. "You know I'm almost guaranteed to try and strangle you in the middle of the night because of - " he starts, and Steve rolls his eyes and reaches over to snag him by his right arm. 

"Uh-huh," Steve says. "I'll be fine." 

"You could have at least let me finish my reasoning," Bucky says, in the mock-grumble that's mostly relief. "It was going to be good." 

"You know what, tell me about it tomorrow," Steve says, hitting the room lights with his free hand and pulling Bucky to bed. "I'll listen all the way through." 

 

There's a relief to having things _done with_ , and the next step and even the next decision about the next step far enough away that it doesn't demand thinking about, not yet. Or at least, worrying about it now would be borrowing worry from the future that's going to get here on its own no matter what he does, so Steve's trying not to, and mostly succeeding. 

Bucky gets better at sleeping again, a bit. Steve eases off on pointing out to him when he's digging at his shoulder, saving it for when it actually looks like he's going to leave marks; for that matter, Bucky seems to notice more. Sometimes that doesn't stop him, but Steve figures that the important part is actually knowing just how often it happens. 

With a certain amount of reluctance, Steve decides that he should probably put off doing any other renovations until spring, at least. Bucky gives him a long tolerant look when he regretfully admits this, and over text Sam laughs at him. 

_You can come renovate my place if you want_ , he says. _It's something I keep meaning to do, and then I remember I HATE do-it-yourself crap, so I don't._

_Laugh all you want,_ Steve replies, _when I was a kid I wanted to be a carpenter. I like making stuff. Considering how much of it I end up breaking whenever something exciting happens, it feels like at least an_ attempt _at balance._

_Whatever makes you happy, man,_ Sam tells him, _whatever makes you happy._

 

Two weeks later, a courier brings a parcel. 

"Can I assume you didn't order something?" Steve asks, after he closes the door, frowning at the box until he notices the tidy Stark Enterprises invoice on the side. 

"Not unless I'm having some _really_ elaborate blackouts you're not telling me about," Bucky replies, from the couch. "Looks like it's from Stark." And he pulls open the drawer in the side-table and tosses Steve the knife he keeps there. 

The number of knives and guns scattered around the condo probably isn't legal, but Steve hasn't bothered to even say anything. Although if he finds any grenades he might have to. But so far it's all knives and handguns, some of them in inexplicable places, like the baking cupboard. 

Well. Inexplicable until you stop and think about the fact that the baking cupboard has sight-line out the kitchen window down to the ground _and_ to the front window and the door. 

On the whole, Steve's to the point where he barely notices. It only gets disconcerting when Bucky digs out a knife while he's asleep or mostly asleep. Steve's considering making the bedroom a gun-only space, because Bucky doesn't do that with guns. 

There is literally _nobody_ he can say that to without it sounding a lot worse out loud than it really is, though. 

Steve slits the box open, pulls out the ridiculous stuffed bear holding a heart, frowns at the writing on the heart until it makes sense, and then sighs and tosses the bear to Bucky. Who frowns at it, holds it up and says, "What?" 

"Haven't been paying attention to the dates," Steve says, "you came here about a year ago. Tony thinks he's funny." 

Bucky looks at the bear and the _HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!_ printed over the red heart again, says, "There's something seriously wrong with him," and throws the stuffed animal towards the arm-chair. Steve's already lifting out the envelope at the bottom of the box; he opens it and takes a look. 

"These are for you," he says, and hands them over to Bucky, exasperation at the stuffed animal and Stark's questionable sense of humour dissolving into a kind of careful neutrality. Bucky takes the envelope's contents out in one pile, looks at them long enough to see that they're arm designs and then slides them almost too quickly back in with one abrupt exhale. 

" _Later_ ," he says, in answer to the question Steve actually didn't need to ask. "Later." 

 

 _Later_ means the next morning. Steve half opens his eyes when Bucky gets up, but it's four AM and the water in either the shower or the tub starts to run just a few seconds after Bucky leaves, so Steve rolls over and goes back to sleep for an hour and a bit. When he does get up, Bucky's sitting in the dining-room with coffee and three designs unfolded across the table, a pencil up at the top of the centre one. Which he's glaring at like he's annoyed, somehow. 

Steve pours himself some coffee, notices how Bucky's holding his head and puts down the mug beside Bucky's. When he rests his hands on Bucky's shoulders, Bucky sighs and leans back in the chair. And Steve can actually _feel_ the knot of unhappy muscle on the left side of Bucky's neck with barely any pressure at all. "What did you do?" he asks. 

"I don't know," Bucky says, "but you can say that whatever it was I'm really sorry and I won't do it again." 

Steve smiles slightly and tells him, "I don't actually think that works any better with neck muscles than it did with girlfriends." 

"Pretend there was a punchline here," Bucky says, "I'm not going to bother thinking one up." Then he adds, "Is Stark usually obnoxiously perceptive when you're not expecting it?" 

"Yeah," Steve says. "It's one of his more annoying habits. And he's got a lot of those, so it's got a lot of competition. Why?" 

"Nothing," Bucky replies, in the irritable voice that says it's something, it's just something he doesn't want to talk about. He waits until Steve stops working at the knot, because if he does anymore he'll just irritate it, says, "Thanks," and then leans forward to circle the number 2 at the top of the middle design and fold it back up. It's the only one he puts back in the envelope. 

Steve doesn't say anything about how, as far as he could see, the design matched up pretty closely with the one Bucky's already got. He'd wondered about Bucky going that way, privately, but he hadn't expected Tony to figure that much out on his own. 

That really _is_ one of his more annoying habits. 

 

The anniversary bear somehow ends up living on the armchair where Bucky tossed it, mostly because neither of them get around to moving it. They mostly sit on the couch in the living-room anyway. At one point Steve gets tired of looking at the poor thing lying on its face so he sits it up, but it doesn't really occur to him to move it somewhere else.


	4. Chapter 4

It starts like all floods start. Seeping in around the edges. Bleeding fingers in through the cracks, fingers that turn into trickles, into rivulets, into streams, into the flood and you're drowning again. He's drowning again. 

He's drowning in memory again, except this time he knows exactly fucking why and what it is and why it's his to breathe in, his to choke on. And this time that makes it worse. This time it makes it worse. 

He wanted to remember and now he does. 

He remembers enough. 

 

They bleed their way across the notes on his wall before he even notices them. When he started this, scrabbling for slivers and clutching at fragments and trying to make them make some kind of shape, he wrote down everything - every image, every thought, every feeling, every moment that teased at the edge of his mind and then disappeared, or stayed, or changed. Some of those are still there; some still don't have an answer, some still don't have a root. Some of them are probably lies. 

Others are gone. And some of those were lies, but others got replaced by one word, two words, a photograph, some marker for the shape of a piece of the past that's too big for scribbled description. The front of a school that doesn't exist anymore up by the corner; a printed jpeg of a newspaper announcing the bombing of Pearl Harbour; the word _Breitenau_ scribbled across a piece of notepaper; other things. Names. A folded piece of paper stabbed with a pin beside one of the short-reminders, if he doesn't trust it to stay. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes the damage moves around, what he remembers today is gone tomorrow. 

And that's where they start, and he doesn't see them. Doesn't notice them. They're just more pieces. Sometimes they're lies, or lies and truth mixed up; he learned ages ago to read the suppressed wince on Steve's face when one of those was coming, when Steve would have to tell him he'd cut and pasted memory to twist away from the poison. And maybe that's when he starts to _notice_ that poison, but he's still scrambling so he pushes it away. 

After a while there's still too much and he starts using coloured thread to mark the passage of time, the order to trace from piece to piece, because the walls aren't big enough to hold it all in a line he can read otherwise and he gets mixed up and lost enough on his own. He doesn't need what's supposed to be helping to make it worse. 

The train in the Alps sits in the middle. Almost like a spider in a mangled web. Everything flows from it, backwards or forwards and he's not actually thinking when he starts using red thread for after, and blue for before. 

But there's only so much time anyone can keep themselves from noticing what the _after_ lines map out, so helpfully marked so that even the web they hang on starts to look like just so much blood. And it's not like - 

He knew. There's no solved mystery, no shock, no surprise. Not even a fucking idiot could be surprised, it's smeared all over everything and everywhere, ground in so deep it blocks the forest with every leaf and needle and mound of snow. It's the story and the key. Fuck, he's _here_ because he tried to kill Steve. Tried, tried again, couldn't. Couldn't kill him, couldn't let him die. 

Now the red lines just spread out in front of him all the other times where he could. They show him a glimpse of how just how many there were. 

Some of them have names. Some have stories. Some don't. Some are one, maybe three words: _blonde_ or _French hotel_ or _mud, drowning, car_. The day he notices, the day it finally catches up to him, there are thirty-one markers of one kind or another connected by the thin red lines wrapped around each pin. 

And it's not enough. There's a pressure in his mind, in his _head_ like water hitting a wall and looking for every weak-spot, every flaw, every space to force open and maybe the wall will hold for now but not for long - and he knows, it tells him _not enough_ , nowhere near enough. That the wall could drip with pins and thread and it still wouldn't ever be enough. 

That there can never be _enough_. 

He loses track of time, the world, until Steve's voice startles him back and even then, he stares at Steve's face and every familiar-unfamiliar line of and on it for a second before he has to shake his head a little, trying to shake out the screams, and say, "Sorry, what?" 

"Food," Steve says, holding onto the doorframe with one arm, his face shifting from casual-cheerful to something nearer concerned. "You okay?" 

Bucky can't answer that right now, couldn't to save both their fucking lives, so he lies and says, "Fine," rubs his forehead and adds, "Headache. Sorry." 

He's not sure Steve believes him, but he manages (he thinks) to pull together enough to convince him that it was only a moment that went wrong, only that minute, and food and company will shake it loose. 

 

The dreams don't start that night. Maybe they never would have; it just can't hurt that one of the ways you can derail Steve's brain completely is by stroking your thumb down the line of his inner wrist until his self-control breaks, which admittedly doesn't take much. Not here, not now. 

Sex is good for sleep, and he manages to sleep deeply enough that if he does dream, he doesn't remember, not even fear or pain. 

The dreams start after that. Or, the dreams _change_ after that, change their faces, stop being the uneasy things he's getting used to ignoring and become something else again, and worse than they used to be. And then even if he spends the whole night lying still in the relative dark, he doesn't really sleep. 

He doesn't want to sleep. Reads and scribbles notes by moonlight and light pollution to keep from sleeping without getting up, letting Steve know. If he's awake, he can't be dreaming; it's easier to hold off memories than dreams. 

He can't get away with that for more than a week before Steve notices no matter what he does. Bucky tries to brush it off as much as he can - _just restless, just dreams, nothing important_. It works for maybe another ten days. 

 

Elizabeth Ross invites them to lunch, explicitly _them_. Bucky declines, because he's not sure what he'd do outside of these walls, around normal people, and he lies and says he's going to try sleeping in the sun. He makes Steve go. 

He says, _Me having a bad week doesn't have to mean you turning into a fucking hermit. Go already. Talk to someone that isn't me or Wilson's text app._

In the end, reluctantly, Steve goes. By the time he gets back Bucky's torn down more than half his memory web, the papers and the pins are scattered all over the floor and he's lost any fractured chance of convincing Steve it's nothing, that he's okay. 

He hadn't meant to. He just can't stand to look at it anymore, stupid selfish fucking childish search for everything he wanted without one thought, one God damned thought for what it - 

For anything else. 

All the damned fucking desperation to remember, to have it back, to be okay and no _sliver_ of a thought for anything else. 

And now Steve's standing in the door, and he's probably not doing it on purpose, it's a natural way people stand, lean, when they stay on a threshold but he has one hand on each side of the door-frame and there's no way out that isn't through him. 

"Bucky," he says quietly, "you're not okay. This isn't nothing." 

And he _can't_ , Bucky can't, _can not_ say it, digs one of the knuckles of his right hand into the bridge of his nose; can't explain the rotting shit metaphorically smeared all over that wall, those papers, those names and places. Him. Steve's standing there already painted all-fucking-over with worry and Bucky can't get _that_ on him. Can't. 

"Don't," he says, when Steve takes a breath to ask, or just to talk, or say anything. "Steve, leave it. Please." 

The worry-line gets deeper and Bucky looks away, looks down to the mess on the floor. "Okay," Steve says. "For now." After a second he says, "Come watch something with me. We can clean this up later." 

Steve sits on the couch, and it's another thing Bucky _can't_ so he sits on the floor in front of it. He needs something to do with his hands, so he ends up checking and cleaning the PX4 he keeps in the side-table drawer, not because it needs it, but because it keeps him from playing with a knife instead. He has no idea what Steve puts on, doesn't really notice when it ends. 

When Steve mentions bed something inside Bucky flinches, and he sits up. "I'm having nightmares," he says. "They're getting worse. I should stay out here." 

"Like Hell you should," Steve says, in a voice without heat or weight that means he intends to fight over this one. Bucky pinches the bridge of his nose with his right hand. He _wishes_ his head hurt. It'd be a distraction. It doesn't. 

"I don't really want to find out what happens if I wake up and don't fucking know you, or where I am," he says, keeping it as flat as he can. 

"I can handle that," Steve says. Bucky drops his hand. 

"Fuck, Steve - " he starts. 

"What happens if you wake up out _here_ and don't know where you are?" Steve counters. And the answer to that as he knows fucking well is that Bucky's not going to sleep out here but bringing that up isn't going to win the argument; even if Bucky just refuses to move, all that'll happen is Steve'll drag his comforter out here. It won't help. 

"Fine," Bucky says. Gives up. "Have it your way."

*****

For Steve, sleeping light or sleeping deep has pretty much always been a matter of deciding which he's going to do before he goes to sleep. 

It can even be narrower, even more specific - with some things he can _decide_ what's going to wake him up, so that he'd sleep through the alley-cat in heat but be awake the minute he heard sounds of a fight getting near, in case somebody forgot which door really wasn't theirs. He could sleep through all kinds of laughter and conversation and be awake all at once for the first warning hiss from whoever was on sentry. 

Steve remembers being confused that other people couldn't do that; frankly, he still is, just given up thinking about it.

It means he's well awake by the time Bucky's nightmare brings him close enough to the surface to wake up, realize there's someone lying beside him, and try to smash that person's skull through the mattress; he catches Bucky's left arm as it comes around, metal smacking into his palm, stinging like hell and making him glad he'd braced himself first. 

In the split-second pause that comes afterwards, that second where your brain catches up with how you're not in the same world as the dream and Bucky's eyes are wide with panicked reaction, Steve says, "It's me."

Not an entry in the world's most eloquent statements, but his voice seems to help. The pressure on his hand stops. Bucky's gaze moves from Steve's face to the bed, like he's figuring out where he is, still breathing as fast as he had been asleep - breathing the way that woke Steve in the first place.

Then Bucky _stops_ breathing for a second, before he jerks his arm and the rest of him away, one movement moving him to to sit with his legs off the side of the bed, back to Steve, head in his hands. For a second. Then he drops his arms. "I told you," he starts, voice tight, but Steve's already sitting up.

"And I said I could handle it," he counters. "And I did. So now that we've both said I-told-you-so - are you okay?"

Bucky sits still for a beat, right hand unconsciously worked under the neckline of the long-sleeved t-shirt he wears to sleep, digging at the join between his left arm and his shoulder even harder than normal and almost like he's trying to work his fingers under the metal, looking straight ahead. Then he says, "I'm fine," and gets up and walks out of the room to the bathroom, without looking at Steve.

Steve throws back the comforter, grabs his own shirt from beside the bed because it is a bit chilly out from under the covers, and follows him. 

Bucky's in front of the sink, using his right hand to splash water on his face and, Steve notes, definitely not looking at the mirror, which is easier nowadays than it was when mirrors covered the whole wall. Steve stops in the door, arms folding of their own accord, and says, "I'm supposed to be the terrible liar."

Looking at the slice of wall behind the tap, not the mirror, Bucky reaches for the towel, dries his face. He puts the towel down in a crumpled ball, braces himself on both hands and it takes another minute or two before he says, "Could you just - just leave it. Just, don't."

"If that's what you want," Steve says, neutral; Bucky shakes his head just slightly and pushes himself up.

"Yeah," he says. "That's what I want." And still without his eyes ever going to where the mirror reflects his own face, he sidesteps Steve. Goes back into the hall.

Steve thinks he can see pretty clearly where this is going, and it's going to be hard and maybe even bad because he doesn't think he can _let_ it go there. But he gives something else a shot first anyway and in the same neutral voice he says, "You should come back to bed," because Bucky's heading the opposite direction and one step from the living-room. 

It's not going to happen, at least not yet, and he knows it, but it's still a little ache when Bucky only pauses for a second, shakes his head and takes the two steps towards the door.

"Okay," says Steve, " _now_ I'm asking. And I'm asking about all of it."

This time, Bucky stops, _really_ stops. Steve can see him let go of a breath, and it's the kind of exhale that's one step away from a sigh, and in the wrong direction: it hurts more, it takes more out of you, and there's no rest at the end, just the sudden and sometimes painful return of air when you let go. It's the kind of exhale that goes with pain, or with tears you're trying to pretend you're not crying. 

Bucky raises his right hand almost to his face and then lets it fall, his left hanging at his side in a way it hasn't for months, the way that states not all that subtly that it's for one thing and one thing only, and since there's nothing to fight there's nothing for it to do. 

"I'm not going to stop you," Steve tells him, doing the hard work it takes to keep his voice even, stress off the words. "You need to go, then go. But I'm not going to pretend I like it, or that it doesn't worry me, or that I don't want to know why."

Another breath like the last one and Bucky says, "Jesus Christ - "

But Steve moves around him, walks into the living-room to stand in front of him, doesn't give him the time to pick the wrong part of his name, try distancing that way. Thinks that after the months, he might. Because something is wrong, _seriously_ wrong, and it scares Steve in a way he hasn't been scared since he came home to find a stupid broken spoon in the wall. 

And he'd almost forgotten what it felt like to be that kind of scared, and he could have lived without being reminded. 

"You don't want to be here," Steve says, "I can live with it, but _I_ want you here." And he's conscious of his hands, of the way he's standing; makes his hands stay open, makes his posture stay neutral. Because he thinks maybe he's back in territory where he can seriously fuck things up without seeing how. Might be doing it right now because this, this isn't well thought out. He just knows that, is sure that - 

He doesn't think Bucky should leave here tonight. Doesn't think he should go with whatever this is, whatever's wrong. That it's not something he can go and wear down and then come back when it's not choking him anymore, no harm done. There's pins all over the floor underneath a wall that used to be curated more carefully than any museum in history and something's poisoned. 

And Steve doesn't know what it is, and he needs Bucky not to go. 

Bucky doesn't look at him, won't look at him, looks up instead. But now Steve can see his face; can see eyes-too-wide and set jaw. "That," Bucky says, voice rough, "is because you really have been hit in the head too many times."

"No." Steve takes a step forward, and when Bucky still won't look at him says, "Bucky, _no_. Jesus, I want you here because you're my - "

" _Shut up_ ," Bucky bites out so harsh it takes Steve aback, puts a pause before his last word falls out. 

" - friend."

"Shut _up_ ," Bucky repeats, louder, pushing away from the wall. It takes him back from Steve but away from the door, too; he stops by the one between living-room and kitchen. "Just _shut up_." 

"Didn't before," Steve says, quiet. "Not likely to now."

He kind of wishes he didn't say it. Bucky doesn't flinch, not really, but as much as Steve hates the word, hates having it anywhere _near_ Bucky even in Steve's own head, it maybe looks like he starts to cringe away, before he turns.

And maybe the wall is closer than he thought it was and if that's true then Steve's _really_ worried about what's bad enough that Bucky's losing his proprioception, when Steve knows he should be able to get through the whole place blindfolded without making a sound. 

"I don't," Bucky says, and there's pauses in weird places, so maybe he's struggling with English again too, "want to - I can't . . .talk about this." 

"Bucky the day you _want_ to talk about something like this I'll start watching for the first Horseman," Steve says before he can stop himself, grimaces and goes on, "but fine, don't talk about it, come back to bed. Or sleep out here and I'll get a blanket and sleep in the chair." 

Bucky's already shaking his head, "No - fuck, St - " 

"Then I still want to know _why_ ," Steve says, raising his voice to speak over. "I still want to know what the _fuck_ is going on, and I want to know _why_ you won't stay with me and I'm _not_ going to take that back." 

Bucky turns, and he's tired Steve knows, Steve _knows_ , hasn't slept right for weeks now, hasn't eaten, and the funny thing, the irony is that because he's gotten so much better, done so well up to now that _now_ these things matter. Matter as much as they would for anyone. Worse, even. And Steve knows that and doesn't like, isn't sanguine about what Bucky has to be doing to be able to drag up this kind of calm, even if only for a minute. 

"You," Bucky says, almost too quiet to hear, "shouldn't want to be anywhere near me." 

Steve stares at him. He realizes his fists are closed, makes them open; realizes he's breathing faster and makes himself calm down. Lets the words sit for a minute before he replies, "I'm gonna assume it took you this long to say it because you know how stupid it sounds." He strives for a matter-of-fact note and gets it more than he expects. 

"Only to you." Bucky's hands open and close. There's a ghost of a smile around his mouth, or something you had to call a smile except bitter as Hell. He closes his eyes and says, " _Only_ to you, Steve, because you are the _only one_ who won't -" and he stops and looks away. 

There's a cold knot in Steve's gut, suddenly; he demands, "Won't what?" but he thinks he knows, and knows it when Bucky makes a sound that's trying to be a laugh and isn't, opens both arms as if he's presenting himself. And for a second Steve feels like someone's stabbed him, because that, because that movement, that _gesture_ \- 

Bucky's always done that, except he hasn't since Steve found him again, and he does it now, for this. Does it and turns away. 

There's a lot that Steve wants to say, so much that thank God it all gets stuck in his throat and he has to think before he answers, because anything else would probably go very, very wrong. And he suddenly doesn't think that right now, things can afford to go wrong.

It had to come. Probably had to. And maybe he should have seen it coming. Have been able to read the changes, read it at least in the mess earlier tonight. His Russian's getting good enough, maybe he should even have seen it in the names and the words that were going up on that wall. Maybe if he'd seen it and seen it earlier they wouldn't be here.

But he didn't and here they are. 

"No." He can make that word. Shape it, try to wrap it around every bit of certainty he has and he has a lot. " _No._ " He takes a deep breath and says, "And I am not the only - " 

"They help _you_ ," Bucky cuts him off, raising his voice, turning back fast with one arm out, pointing at Steve. "Because they _know you won't get rid of me_ and they care about you," and he stops and swallows and then says, "so they help _you_ pretend I'm something else, something besides what they know and _you_ won't admit, and they hope they can keep you safe." 

Right now it's harder than Steve expected to remember what this is, where it comes from, why Bucky's doing this and who's fault it is. "I thought that was your job," he snaps, and Bucky actually stops and takes a step back, staring at him for a minute, wide-eyed and young, before the twisted not-smile comes back. 

"Yeah," he says, voice quiet again. "And I should do it." 

"I'll come looking again," Steve warns him, and the twisted smile twists into something else that looks more like pain; Steve makes himself say, "I will _always_ come looking, and if I can't find you that just means I've got something to do for however _fucking_ long we end up living." 

Bucky's got his right hand digging at his left shoulder again, and probably doesn't know. He shakes his head. "You are so fucking - " 

"No," Steve cuts him off, "I'm - " 

" _A fucking child_ ," Bucky half-shouts and makes him stop, "a fucking _little girl_ startles me and I have to stop myself from killing her. _Think_ about that, think about what that _makes me_ \- " 

"And her dad threw himself in the God-damned river," Steve drives over him, in turn, "so what does that make him?" When Bucky stops, looks like he's run into something, Steve lowers his voice and says, "Yeah, I know about that. I talked to her mom, her mom said Mercedes talked to you, wanted me to apologize if she 'burdened you' with anything she shouldn't've. Bodies aren't the only thing that gets hurt, you _know_ that. His wounds killed him, yours make your startle reflex dangerous and none of it says a single _God-damned_ thing about you." 

"Do you have any idea," Bucky asks, "how many people I've killed?" 

Steve takes a second for a breath. For groping for some kind of calm, even shaky calm. Bucky turns away from him again. Goes over to the desk and picks up the picture of the two of them and puts it back down, like he doesn't know what to do. 

And after that second Steve starts, "Natasha said SHIELD attributed twenty-five assassinations to the Winter Soldier - " and Bucky turns back fast.

"To _me_ ," he almost snarls, and points at Steve, jerks his hand back at himself as he says, "you look across the room, Rogers, and you _see what's in fucking front of you_ for once - _see what's here._ "

Steve takes a careful breath. A very careful breath. And he doesn't have to remind himself again that it's not Bucky he's angry with but there's enough anger that he still has to work to keep it from spilling over, from getting on things he can't afford to have it touch right now. 

"I do," he says, keeping his voice the same, his gaze steady. And after a minute Bucky drops his eyes again.

"If they only IDed twenty-five kills," he says, tone distant, voice lower and somehow still painful for Steve to hear, "it's no fucking wonder they ended like they did." The bleak imitation of amusement comes back. "Or they're only counting the ones they thought were important." 

He looks up and Steve has to stop himself from crossing the room to him right then; thinks right now that might be more of a threat than a comfort. 

"I can't count them," Bucky says, a kind of twisted laughter in his tone. "It'd take too long, and fuck, how do you count the incidentals? The collateral? How many people fucking _died_ on that freeway when I found you? Of course you don't know how many people I've killed, because _I_ sure as fuck don't - "

"That's not your fault," Steve says. It's hard to stay calm. Not even because of the words - he's got answers for the words as long as there's damn hours in a day, longer; he's got endless answers he can throw at the words, and he's going to. But what's on Bucky's face and in his eyes _hurts_ and it's really, really hard to stay calm. "You didn't have a - "

" _My hands_ ," Bucky almost shouts. Then he makes a noise that was probably supposed to be a laugh, that comes with knife-edges. "My bombs, my guns, my knives," he says, almost singsong. "My hands. Soldiers, civillians, men, women, _children_ , and I didn't," and the words are stilted now, like he's having to fight to say them at all, "I didn't just kill them, Steve, I didn't, I - "

Steve's control slips, or snaps, or something; he demands " _And what else could you_ fucking _do?_ " and it comes out loud enough to drown Bucky's words completely, "and what would _they_ have done if you had? _What,_ Bucky? _Go ahead and tell me!_ " 

Bucky doesn't say anything. He takes a couple convulsive breaths, and his right hand opens and closes, his left staying a locked fist. Steve can see whites almost all around his eyes and as he watches, Bucky's gaze falls to the floor in front of Steve's feet, his mouth just barely open. 

"Bucky," Steve says, because the words are still there and he can't stop them, "tell me, what would they have _done_ , if you said _no_ , if you, I don't know, tried to walk away? What other _fucking_ choice are you dreaming you _had_?"

And maybe, maybe this is it, the big fuck up. Steve watches as Bucky stares wide-eyed at the floor, breathes shallow and short; as his hand goes to his hip where a knife would be if he hadn't just rolled out of bed. Maybe everything Steve just did and said was wrong. Maybe he should have shut up and sat on his fear and let Bucky go. 

Except maybe Bucky would still be gone in the morning, and maybe this time he wouldn't come back. And maybe right now, in this state of mind, he's in as much danger as he's ever been, and maybe more _dangerous_. 

Steve can't tell which way's more tainted with fear, which judgement call isn't judgement, which way would be him just justifying not doing the hard thing. They're all hard, and maybe there isn't a right answer. 

And maybe, maybe the truth is important. Considering what got them here. 

So Steve takes a breath and says, quieter, "What happened in DC?"

Like someone cut a string, Bucky folds, except that Steve can't even tell if Bucky heard him. He just drops to bent knees like something stops holding him up, still on the balls of his feet with his back to the desk's leg, left arm hanging and right thrown across his bent knees.

This time it is like someone cutting puppet-strings, everything folding. Not falling forward or backward, just . . . collapsing. 

Steve crosses the room and crouches down beside him. Slowly, and carefully. Bucky doesn't respond, doesn't do anything, thousand-yard stare fixed at the top of the wall right in front of him. 

"Bucky," Steve says, and reaches out to touch his arm; when Bucky looks at him, or through him, Steve says, "when you showed up here you said you didn't remember me. But you remembered that you did, before, when I said your name." 

After a minute Bucky nods, small and slow. Steve presses, "You remembered then, you knew me and then _something happened_ and all you could remember was remembering. So I'm asking you," he finishes, pausing to take a breath, " _what happened_?"

It takes a long time before Bucky answers, and Steve doesn't think he's really here right now, not in his mind. He's looking down past Steve's shoulder and then back, towards his left and his left arm; then up at the room like he's never seen it before. 

Eventually he says, almost too quiet to hear, "I told him I knew you." His eyes focus a little and his mouth twists, his voice almost like a kid's. "And then I didn't anymore. They took it." He's breathing too fast now and Steve lets himself down onto his knees and reaches over, guides Bucky to sit down before he falls over. 

Bucky looks at him, face still the same and Steve sits across from him. Touches his knee. "Bucky," he says, as Bucky stares at where Steve touched him, "you _didn't have a choice_. They didn't _give_ you one. That was the point, that was the whole idea - they wanted a weapon and that's _all they let you be_ \- Bucky, they wouldn't even let you _die_. You told me -" and when Bucky's expression turns confused, wary shading to afraid Steve amends, "not exactly, but you told me you fought, you killed people, you - that's enough to get anyone killed, and they didn't because they knew," and he has to take a breath, "that they could take enough away that it would stop mattering. You had no choice. Not even death." 

There's no answer; maybe there can't be, maybe what Steve's saying he can't even understand right now, but Steve has to say it anyway. 

"It's all on them, Buck," he says, as gently as he can. "All of it. They took everything away so they could use you and they did, and that's _their fucking fault._ " He rests one hand on Bucky's right knee and almost takes it back when Bucky flinches - stops when he drops his right hand to rest on top of Steve's. "Their fucking fault," Steve repeats, "and not yours. _Not_ yours." 

After a second of silence scratched by Bucky's rapid breathing, Steve moves closer and touches the side of Bucky's face this time. He waits until Bucky will meet his eyes before he says, "Bucky, they already did so much to you - please. _Please_ don't do this to yourself. Please."

Bucky doesn't answer. Steve takes his hands, skin on the right and metal on the left, both so tightly closed that there'll be nail marks in skin when the right hand opens, and he puts them between his own, rests his forehead there. Bucky makes a choking noise; when Steve looks up he's shaking his head "You don't know - " he starts, but Steve squeezes his right wrist and he stops. 

"I know enough," Steve says. "Every body, every memory, every nightmare - I know _who to blame_ , Bucky and it's _not you_." He puts one hand on the back of Bucky's neck, rests Bucky's forehead against his. "I know that the memories and nightmares are something _else_ being done to you. Not guilt you deserve. And I'm sorry I can't fix it. God knows I am."

He doesn't know if Bucky believes him, but after a while Bucky's breath slows down again, and Steve can feel some of the muscles unlock. Partly because now Bucky's shivering.

"Come back to bed," Steve says, softly. "It doesn't matter if you sleep, if you dream, it doesn't, just - stay here, with me. Where you can see me and I can find you. Please."

Eventually Bucky nods, just, forehead moving against Steve's. Steve stands up and pulls Bucky to his feet. And Bucky's not really steady; in the end Steve ends up taking hold of his arm to lead him back to Steve's room and he _doesn't_ like how easily Bucky follows or how blank he looks, but Steve can't pretend to know what's going on inside his head, either. Or what it would be like to have what he does in there.

Lights never made it on, so there's nothing to turn off; Bucky sits on the side of the bed and then lets himself lie down, curls on one side. Steve gets in behind him and pulls the comforter over both of them. He wraps his top arm around Bucky and pulls him back close and it's maybe a little reassuring when Bucky tangles the fingers of his right hand with Steve's and holds his hand too tight for comfort. Steve rests his forehead against back of Bucky's neck. Breathes the smell of fear and metal. Which is better than absence. So much. 

Bucky's shivering, but it eases off after a bit. Mostly. They've been lying in the near dark for a while when Bucky breaks silence.

"I knew you," he says, his voice still distant and strange, and quiet. "Even after everything, I knew you."

Steve tightens his arm and for a long vicious moment wishes, _wishes_ Pierce and Zola weren't dead, so he could kill them himself, _himself_ , with his bare hands. Then he shoves it away: to Hell with them, and if there's any justice, literally. They're dead, they're _gone_ , and Bucky's here.

"I know, Buck," he says. "I know." 

And in his head the only thing is, _please, please God let this be okay._ No grace to it, no shape, just _please_. 

Just _please_.

******

Bucky loses most of the rest of the night. Not to sleep. Experience jumps from lying curled on his side under covers with Steve's arm around him to sitting against the headboard with his knees bent up, left arm hanging loose and right turning one of the knives he keeps under the mattress over and over in his fingers. The sun's just up. 

There's nothing in between. Just one moment, then the other. He hates that. _Hates_ it. Now more than ever. Hates the reason, hates the feeling, hates knowing there's another stretch of time he can't be sure where he was, who he was, what he did. It doesn't matter that he probably didn't do anything, probably just lost the fight for control of his screaming mind and moved and went for a weapon to sit and wait until something made sense again. He doesn't _know_. 

He can't know. It's gone. Recording corrupted, system not engaged. 

He still feels sick. He still feels like his body is a meat-puppet he's controlling and nothing more. He still doesn't want to be here - just, not quite as much as he doesn't want to know he left when Steve didn't want him to. 

Still sees the same things on the inside of his head. Not the dream, the dream is gone, the dream made no sense to start with but that's not the point, the point is that the dream woke up memory and now he can't get it to sleep again and doesn't have the right to, anyway. 

Except mixed up with them is sitting, waiting - different bed, different time, different world, Steve small and curled up and coughing until he's sick, then different again, both laughing, Steve coughing - _Jesus, breathe, why don't you -_ \- 

They twist up and it makes it worse. 

Here and now, Steve's lying on his side. He's not asleep. Bucky doesn't know how long he's not been asleep, if he slept again at all, if Steve's been lying there watching him for hours, if he did anything Steve had to deal with in the blank space he doesn't remember. Maybe later he'll be able to ask. Right now, that guilt just spreads on top of the other like scum on poison. 

A little bit of daylight is working its way through the windows to fall in shapes of shadow on the floor before Steve asks, "What is it?" Bucky shakes his head, maybe a fraction. The muscles in his neck hate him for it. 

He remembers that he didn't used to notice that. 

"You don't want to know," he says, and after the words wonders if he managed that in English. Maybe, maybe not. Steve's Russian's getting better the same rapid way his French and German used to, and it's enough that Bucky can't always tell from his reaction anymore. 

"I don't want it to've happened," Steve says. Counters. "It did, I don't have a time machine, so yeah, I do want to know. There's nothing," he finishes, sitting up to lean on his elbow, "about you or what happened to you I don't want to know, Buck." 

It's probably true, because Steve's an idiot like that. The truth might be closer to _it'll hurt you to know_ but saying _that_ isn't going to go any way to winning any argument with Steve. Steve tries to pretend pain is an inconvenience and nothing else. 

The knife-blade he's holding between his fingers feels more familiar to Bucky right now than anything else. There's no old blood on it, not this one: it's new and he hasn't killed anyone since he got it. Hasn't killed anyone in a while, a while that really isn't that long, if you hold it up against the rest. But it is what it is, doesn't pretend to be anything else, black handle, black blade, sharp edge - made to kill people, nothing else. 

He stares through the blade as he runs the next few minutes in his head, the likelihood of there being any way refusing to tell him won't feel worse, and gives up on it. "The number Romanova gave you, the number of missions - a fraction. Not a big one. Probably only the big names, only the ones other people thought were important enough to care about. It's what people think matters, but it's - " 

He gropes for a way to explain, when he's only just been managing to put pieces in line. "Erskine found you at the recruiting centre by the Expo," he says. "If that girl," and he can't remember either girl's name, not now, and he kind of hates that too, "the girl I brought, if she hadn't been quite so disappointed about you, so unhappy - would you even have gone?" 

Steve takes a minute, the worry-line on his forehead that Bucky doesn't like seeing deepening. Eventually Steve says, "I honestly don't know. Maybe not. Can't say it didn't sting." 

"Fate of the world, hanging on what one girl thinks of her blind date," Bucky says. "Pretty thin thread." 

He rubs the back of his right wrist across his forehead, trying to think, trying to at least know which fucking language he's going to speak in before he does instead of finding out after. "It's not always like that," he says, "but it's not always . . . sensible either - somewhere in between. Zola," and he has to stop, and swallow, before he can go on, God fucking damn it, "was good at guessing about the in-between times. So I killed a lot of people no one would look twice at. I think some of them weren't even the important ones." His mouth twists. "You want to scare some official into doing something you want, leaning the right way, you don't kill him, you need him. You just show him how easy it would be to rain Hell on someone _like_ him. You nail the kids from the family next door to the wall, paint the walls with their blood, leave their heads on his doorstep." 

Maybe Steve reacts to that, maybe he doesn't; Bucky doesn't know, because he's staring through the knife again. "And I think some were just . . . throwing oil on whatever fire they wanted burning, leaving bodies and slaughters that look like they were done by one of whatever bunch of people hated each other, wherever they were. Find somewhere there might be a hope in Hell of people sorting their shit out, make sure they don't." 

"You're remembering," Steve says. Bucky makes a noise trying to be a laugh; it scrapes and claws on its way out. 

"If you want to call it that," he says. "I wasn't supposed to remember, nothing was there very long - bigger fucking mess than anything else. Pieces, moments. Dream pulled something in Africa, maybe Somalia." He flips the knife to catch the handle without really thinking about it. "Boy who screamed for a long time before he finally died." 

Why, and why it took so long, he keeps behind his teeth, bites off before the words can accidentally come out; Steve's complete shit at thinking like a bastard, so anything Bucky tells him will actually be worse than what he'll come up with on his own. 

He doesn't realize how tight he's holding the knife handle until Steve's hand is over his and Steve's saying, "Bucky, let go - gimme the knife." There's more time gone, lost, maybe half an hour, the squares of light that much closer to the bed. When Bucky opens his fingers the joints catch a little, like he's been holding it that tight the whole time he lost. "And c'mere," Steve adds, pulling gently at Bucky's ankle. 

It takes him longer to do that, and when he does every joint slips and catches like his fingers had while muscles wake up and scream and the skin stretches uncomfortably around the seam between left shoulder and the rest of him. When he gets close enough Steve wraps both arms around him and pulls him back, works his hands under Bucky's shirt so they're resting skin to skin against his ribs, so they're both lying halfway between side and back, Bucky's weight against Steve's shoulder. 

"You didn't do that," Steve says. "Zola did. Pierce did. Whoever the Hell came before Pierce did. They used you to do it but _they're_ guilty, not you. I don't - " he stops, lets out a breath and takes another one, "I don't want to say what I did last night, Buck, I messed you up and I'm sorry, but you _know_ this. You _know_ you didn't have a choice and you know you couldn't've done anything and you know _why_." 

Bucky doesn't answer him. Wishes he had the knife back. 

"And I know . . . " Steve says, more haltingly, like he's grasping at something too, "I know that's not . . . great - I know you probably don't want to think about that. But Jesus, Buck, if it's a choice between that and you thinking what they did is your fault, I'm gonna remind you. Because it isn't. You're not responsible. You weren't capable," he says, taking another breath, "of being _responsible_." 

The thing about Steve is he can make that sound like something you could believe. 

Bucky doesn't think he's shaking but that's probably only because he'd have to relax to shake and he can't make himself do that. And it's dislocation in his head, again, and that's probably why he says, "I think some people would argue that one." 

"Fine," Steve says. "I'll break their fucking noses." At Bucky's purely startled half-snort of laughter, Steve says, "I'm not going to waste my time arguing with that kind of idiot. They can get a lecture in basic moral theory from someone else." 

"You can't punch out everyone, Steve," Bucky says. Steve shifts a little and rests his cheek against the back of Bucky's head. 

"Most people I can," he says. "And the ones I can't, I'll just tell Natasha." 

He can't _see_ Bucky's sudden frown of confusion, but it must come through in the silence or in a change in his body Bucky doesn't mean to make, because Steve goes on, "If they're blaming you for that, then they're blaming Barton for what Loki used him to do," in an almost offensively logical voice. "And I'm pretty sure letting Natasha find out you've even _thought_ that is an invitation for her to explain how wrong you are. Violently." 

For a minute nothing Steve says makes sense; it takes time for Bucky's brain to remember what he read, what Steve's told him about the Battle of New York, the Chitauri, Loki and his staff. "I forgot about that," he says. 

"I figured," Steve says. "Not like most of it's that important." And there's no sarcasm there. 

Bucky still wants the knife back, but doesn't reach for it or ask for it; tries to find something else to say, or to think, and keeps getting caught, tripping and stumbling and making it hard to breathe again. "Fuck," he says, eventually. "I really wish I could get drunk." 

Steve's arms tighten a bit, but all he says is, "Don't say that in front of Stark, he'll start a think-tank." Then he says, "After everything else they did, Buck, please don't let them pile the last of their shit on you, too." 

Right now there isn't a kid screaming in his head anymore, maybe only because now his head feels stuffed full of . . . something. Something cloying and thick that it's hard to think through. But the screaming's still there, and more. So much more. 

"Not that easy," he says. 

"I know," Steve says. "But just - let me tell you it's wrong. And believe me. Trust me." 

He doesn't answer. He doesn't have one. 

When the sunlight's almost touching the opposite wall (and normally he'd know what time that makes it but fucked if he can remember right now) Bucky tries to tell Steve he should get up; Steve just says, "I didn't have anything planned." If Bucky gets up he probably will, but otherwise he's going to be stubborn, and since right now there's _nothing_ appealing about moving more than it takes to keep his right hand from falling asleep, Bucky gives up. 

Not moving means he doesn't have to think. Decide what to do. And if there's a far distant part of him insisting that staying here with Steve's skin against his like it's a lifeline is fucking pathetic, it is a far distant part and when he asks it _more pathetic than what fucking part of anything else that's happened in the last year_ it doesn't have an answer. 

So he stays. He thinks Steve dozes, even if Steve's arms don't go slack - 

And then he's waking up, shoving himself back and choking on the smell of burning hair and flesh and plastic, Steve catching him before he throws himself over backward by the force of pushing the bed away. The smell goes, the dream goes, the taste of the smoke stays at back of his throat; there's only the room, the bed and the smell of him and Steve both needing a shower. 

" _Fuck,_ " he breathes, as Steve lets him go - slowly, like he's not sure Bucky can take his own weight. The dream doesn't leave anything, nothing, except knowing that someone was burning and screaming and the stink in his throat. He puts his left hand down to lean on, scrubs at his eyes with his right. 

Steve doesn't ask him if he's okay. At this point that'd be redundant and not even be funny. 

His head hurts less; Bucky can't tell if it's clearer, or if that's just because of remembered stink and fire, but he can make his body relax a little, work on breathing. And if he was dreaming - "How long was I asleep?" he asks. He realizes the collar of his sleep-shirt is damp with sweat. 

"Few hours," Steve says; Bucky looks at him, sees the deep indents of cloth and seam on Steve's right arm and frowns. Steve catches it and adds, "Don't. I don't even have pins and needles. And I wasn't going to wake you up." 

The back of Bucky's mouth still tastes like the smoke, and if his head doesn't hurt as much it still probably hurts more than makes it worth bothering arguing a lost cause, at least right now. And the seam of scar beside his left arm itches and then burns when he pushes at it with the heel of his hand, on top of his shirt. "Fuck," he says again and then, "I need something to drink.

*****

Bucky puts coffee on, brushes his teeth; when he kicks the door mostly-closed and the bathtub tap starts running, Steve rubs at his still-tingling arm and gets up to dig something to eat out of the fridge. 

There's a screen of texts and a missed call on his phone: he can't remember the last time he ignored it this long and it shows and given he was supposed to meet Elizabeth for lunch again - and try to drag Bucky with him - he's not surprised she got worried. Although he didn't know she had Sam's number. 

Probably got it off Tony. 

He texts her back with _sorry, rough night_ , opens Sam's texts to reply and then stares at the tiny keyboard, tiny field, types _sby; email_ and since the water's still running and his typing's not bad anymore he wakes up the computer and sends as quick a summary as he can - quick and, well, shallow, sticking to what happened and the important parts of what was said, skipping a lot of detail. And then admitting at the end that he was summarizing. A lot. 

It doesn't take very long before he gets a text back saying, _you okay? and don't you dare just type 'fine' on automatic, man._

And to be fair, he probably would have, but Steve sighs, texts, _I've been better, I'll *be* fine_. 

Remembers almost all of their towels are in the dryer and goes to pull them out. 

 

By the time Steve gets out of the shower and pulls on clean clothes, there are the empty wrappers for two protein bars on the kitchen counter and a broken mug in the sink, and Bucky's sitting on the single bed in his room, staring at the mess on the floor. 

Steve hesitates in the doorway and then crosses to sit beside him. It looks like Bucky mostly just reached up to the top of his careful web and started ripping things down in handfuls; there's thumbtacks and pins on the floor, and some of the papers are torn; some of them are still hanging, or caught up in the thick thread. 

"I should clean this up and throw it out," Bucky says, voice inflectionless. 

Steve says, "You don't really want to do that," and Bucky straightens up a little, looks up at what's intact and what's hanging off the wall. 

"No," he admits. "But I should." 

And Steve realizes he doesn't know if that's true or not, if he should or shouldn't - if the impulse to convince Bucky that it isn't is right, or misguided, or selfish, or something else. After a minute of sitting in silence trying to figure it out and failing, he gropes at an idea. 

"Maybe get a box," he says finally, "a shoebox or a cereal box or something, put it away and think about it later." 

After another minute or two, Bucky nods. 

 

Sam's last text says Steve should call him tomorrow, which Steve thinks is more Sam figuring he needs to talk than anything else. And he's probably right. 

Bucky spends most of the rest of the daylight sitting out on the balcony wrapped in the throw he keeps on the couch, coming back in to refill his cup and otherwise staring out at nothing much. Steve would worry about what he might be thinking but frankly, he doesn't think Bucky really _is_. Thinks he's mostly letting time slide by without getting close enough to it to get caught up, metaphorically speaking. 

He does come in around twilight and mechanically eats enough of the pizza Steve orders to let Steve worry a little less about that; after that Steve figures it'll be too cold for Bucky to want to be outside, even now, and he's not wrong - Bucky puts his plate in the sink and says, "Pick something to put on to make noise or I'm going to start watching _Game of Thrones_." 

"God forbid," replies Steve, although he wouldn't actually care much today; horrible fictional people being awful to each other sometimes stops seeming so obnoxious compared to reality sometimes, and it's . . . comforting to think about how long they've been arguing about this stuff, the trail of continuity behind them. 

He hesitates over _My Neighbour Totoro_ but decides that's a step too far, sticks in _The Princess Bride_ instead as a kind of mock-compromise and carefully doesn't notice that Bucky picks up the pocket-knife from off the mantel before he drops himself onto the couch beside Steve, or that he turns it over and over in his right hand until about halfway through he actually manages to fall asleep against Steve's side. 

How long that'll last Steve has no idea. He lets the movie play out and then reaches over carefully to turn off the lamp on the side-table. 

He's slept sitting up before.

******

The next few days are raw and skinless and Bucky didn't _need_ to remember (along with everything else) enough to know that as metaphors go _skinless_ is actually pretty fucking damn accurate for the way he feels, where the only thing driving him more insane than the itch of being still is the flaring pain of moving. 

So to speak. 

And it's not the kind of skinless or raw that makes you grateful for people being careful or taking care, as if Bucky's ever experienced that kind in his life - it's the kind that turns you into an injured predator in a corner. 

Or him it does, at least. 

That makes it worse, adds _guilty_ to the mix and twists it all around until he's one step away from _wishing_ he could lose hours again, have the world slip, because at least it wouldn't be this. 

One step. Not a little one. 

He can't think about what Steve said; he can't even think about what he said, what he argued, what he tried to do. Somewhere, somehow, when he slept or while he pretended he did because he didn't want to deal with being awake, his mind found somewhere to put it all, like shuffling boxes up into someone's fucking attic: you can't make them go away and you can't open them and deal with it so you just put them all away, there but not important, out of the way but not lost. 

He doesn't know how long that'll work, if it _should_ work, but it doesn't matter because right now it's do that or drown, do that or find the edge he _can't_ go past, the edge where everything breaks and all that's left is the animal refusal to die. 

And then a lot of people get hurt. Almost certainly starting with Steve, and if not, ending with him, when he finally does what he has to and puts Bucky down. 

So there's not much to do but put it away, now. Hope it stays put away long enough. 

Maybe it will. 

None of it does much for the desire to _shake_ Steve and ask him what the fuck is wrong with him, what he thinks he's doing, why he's stupid enough to have Bucky here. Not that it's worth doing. Not that he doesn't know the answer Steve'll give. (That _he'd_ give, if everything were the other way around - ), just - 

Just. 

There's probably someone out there who could handle all of this with something like grace, but it sure as hell isn't him. 

 

And you would think that getting to the point where _he_ notices when his weight starts to drop again, when eating too little or nothing at all is making him feel like shit, would make it easier for him to do something about it. Maybe it even does. But it makes him _hate_ it more. 

More or less everything makes him hate _everything_ more. It isn't pressure, it doesn't build up - it just saturates until it's dripping from everything, leaving smears on everything else. He's a miserable son of a bitch, knows it, does what he can to keep it down and away from Steve, who doesn't deserve it and isn't going to get pissed off about it, which can make Bucky want to strangle him. 

Except he isn't pissed off at Steve, he's pissed off at _himself_. And by this point pretty god-damn sure that if alcohol still _worked_ he'd be well, well on his way to being a drunk, and he's not even sure he's grateful for the fact that it doesn't. And in some ways it's like being drunk anyway - the miserable part, the part where you swear you'll never drink that much again, where you've forgotten why you even thought it was a good fucking idea in the first place. 

And if it eases - and it does, slowly, over days - it's _still_ like being fucking drunk because the world afterwards is like a hangover, rage leaking out into frustration and blankness, headache and nausea and dull staring. 

It takes the better part of a week to wear off. Mostly. Until he only feels twitchy instead of skin-stripped, irritable instead of . . .anything else. 

Irritable . . . still doesn't help. 

 

He meant to - 

He meant a lot of things. 

Meant to say meant to ask meant to do. Meant to think, and that's where it starts, where things get stuck, mired and twisted. Thoughts that scrape out the inside of his skull or cut their way through, or where trying to think one thing throws him face-first into the filth of another, or they contaminate one another and the only way to get away from them is to _not think_ and that brings contamination of his own. 

So he means, Bucky _means_ to talk, to say, to point out to Steve that he's not actually made of fucking glass, to fucking relax, that some of the ways Steve's careful make things worse, not better. Because the same part of Bucky that thinks he's poison here, that he should leave, that he should _be gone_ tries to work itself into everything, and all the reason in the fucking world only goes so far to stop him from _knowing_ he's a taint Steve's letting infect him because of debts, because of loyalty, because of the past, because he's a god-damned stupid selfless bastard. 

Because after two lifetimes in the dark and the cold when you're not covered with fucking blood means it's hard to overstate - 

Hard to explain. Hard to _say_ what it means having someone willing to, wanting to touch you. How easy it is to remember you're poison if you can't believe they do. How it's a problem, how easily it can get worse. 

He means to, and it doesn't work that way. 

 

Sometimes it's like there's pieces of him, layers, like somehow the bastards managed to split him like veneer away from a beam, so that there's part of him sometimes that can still think like a fucking human being but it's never in control and it's never in charge, and sometimes only makes things worse - because it's the part that sees what Steve does. Sitting close and brushing past and inviting every way but outright - and sanity can see that. 

And all it is is a nagging voice above everything else Bucky thinks, everything else with a wire into his body and the rest of his head, that decides what he does and what he doesn't do. And he would, and he _wants_ , desperately wants, and all it does is tangle up like razor-wire around a hand where you can't pull anything without blood and you can't even cut it because it's wound too tight. 

Twists around the part that wants any excuse to find rage again and pulls pieces out, no matter how much he tries not to. 

And it's cold, and the world is trying to fade, and in the end when Steve sits down beside him on the couch Bucky loses it for a second, hooks Steve's leg with his, catches his arm and hauls him off the couch to the floor. 

Whatever it is Steve _was_ expecting, it isn't this; he hits the ground on his side with a _hunh_ of exhaled air, without managing to catch himself at all. He's managed to catch up a little by the time he's on his back with Bucky's knee pinning his leg and Bucky's hands pinning his forearms, and _doesn't_ manage to keep from looking a little, more than a little aggrieved. "What - "

"What in the name of God is your problem?" Bucky cuts him off and he's startled by just how much it comes out like a snarl, when he meant it to be a question. Meant to. "Did you start playing games while I was staring at the inside of a freezer? Or do you honestly think I'm so fucking fragile you can't do anything more than sit around looking coy until I notice? Or have to write me a fucking note?" 

He doesn't mean to say any of it like that, except that every sharp edge twists, digs deep and means that he does. And maybe someday Steve'll learn to lie but it's not today: there's the flash of guilt that turns into a more stubborn frown, and Bucky lets go of his arms and sits back a bit. "Jesus," he says, and there's still more edge than he means, or thought he meant, and more resentment, and maybe disgust, "Steve do you _honestly_ think you could make me do anything I didn't want to?" 

_He_ doesn't expect the abrupt twist of Steve's body that throws him off balance - he probably should have, he _taught_ Steve that one - or to end up on his back, everything inverted and Steve's jaw set the way it gets when he's about to do something he doesn't want to. 

He's more serious about this than Bucky was, and Bucky has to short-circuit the almost automatic response, because he can't throw Steve off without hurting him and he's _not_ going to do that. And that isn't harder than he'd expect but that doesn't make it _easy_ and he can't make himself relax: he can hold back but he can't stop from being _ready_ to throw Steve the minute Steve gives him an opening, throw him and get the fuck off the floor. 

Bucky glares back at him, not actually sure what this is: Steve's face being an open book doesn't help right now. He can see the conflict, the internal argument, but he has no fucking idea what it's about. Steve looks down at him, jaw tight and for a minute neither of them says anything. It gets harder and harder not to throw him off. 

The Steve takes a deep breath and says, "Actually, after the last month yeah I think I pretty much can, Bucky. Point of fact I think I _have_." 

And there's guilt, there's worry - apprehension even, written all over Steve's face and part of Bucky watches them while the rest of his head, the rest of _him_ feels like he just hit the ground from much, much too high. 

He knows he's staring, blank and taken aback. Startled. And he thinks _you're not supposed to know that,_ wonders how the fuck Steve _does_. What changed while he wasn't looking, because this . . . isn't something Steve thinks about, not something his head is cut out for. Not something he'd ever _want_ to touch. 

Bucky's stomach tightens a little. He hadn't meant to bring this into Steve's life, either. 

Steve watches him. He says, "You want to tell me I'm wrong, you go ahead, but remember you're only a better liar than I am with everyone _else_." And his face is still set; underneath it he's anxious and worried, but in the place where choices get made, Steve's dug in. 

He's not wrong, and Bucky can't tell him he is. Not . . . reliably. Not if he's off-kilter, not if something's twisted wrong or gone on edge and he can't always, doesn't always notice when they do, doesn't catch the moment reality gets compromised and hacked into the shapes his head won't let go of. It doesn't matter, it's never _mattered_ ; the problem isn't when he doesn't notice the problem is when he _does_ and everything jerks sideways until he has to stop himself from killing over bad phrasing and crazy. 

And he doesn't _care_. It doesn't fucking matter. 

Except. 

Except that in Steve's place he probably would care, even if Steve didn't - he'd care _more_ if Steve didn't, more _because_ he didn't. From that end the reasons for caring probably don't seem as small and unimportant, either. He knows that. He wishes he didn't, but he does; can't cut that part out, either, without taking bits of himself he still needs. 

"For some things," Bucky admits reluctantly and then, at the flicker of deepening frown on Steve's face he suppresses an irritable sigh and amends, "For a lot of things. Maybe for most things. Not this. I don't want you to touch me, trust me, you'll know." 

And he knows Steve doesn't believe him, and for a minute some of the tension he's been trying to get rid of while his brain wasn't looking comes back and it's _anger_ , because _God damn it_ Steve what do you even think - 

\- and then Bucky realizes he's wrong, and relaxes all at once because he has to start laughing, because it's so incredibly fucking _funny_ in a deeply horrible way, and that just makes it funnier. 

He recognizes the edge of hysteria when he's losing his balance over it, but it still is just that fucking hilarious, because it's not that Steve _doesn't_ believe him, it's that Steve's head's so eaten with worry he _can't_ and the irony, the irony of everything is just too fucking funny. 

And right now Steve can't decide if he's concerned or annoyed, which in the wave of slightly unhinged hilarity is kind of adorable but means that Bucky tries to find the edge and pull himself back far enough to let the laughter go, and breathe, and talk. 

He says, "Fucking Hell, Steve, you pick _the worst_ time to learn how to think like a bastard son of a bitch, you know that? Let go," he adds, indicating his wrists with a jerk of his chin, "I'm not going to throw you off." 

Steve does, but doesn't get up, which is probably fair; there's a very, very faint flush to his cheeks the way he gets not so much because he's embarrassed about anything, or anything like it, but because he doesn't know _how_ to show the miserable tangle of feelings he's got or even what they're fucking called, so it's like the reaction comes out of the roulette wheel. It's what happens when he's just _upset_ , one big fucking mess of it, and doesn't know what to do.

It makes Bucky wonder how long and what Steve's been thinking, or trying not to think, without letting on or asking; wonders how Steve's been handling ideas as anathema to who and what he is as _rape_ and all related kinds of misuse. Exactly how deep the shit is he's been dragging his mind through. 

Hopefully not that long, and hopefully not that deep. 

Bucky sighs and rubs his forehead with the side of his right wrist; it probably (hopefully) _hasn't_ been deep, or he might have ended up at the answer for himself. Maybe. 

Bucky says, "You're still fucking terrible at it, for the record - _Steve_ ," he goes on, before Steve has time to decide which, distress or frustration, is going to drive his reaction, "Jesus, think for a minute." 

And when Steve looks blank Bucky has to stop himself from laughing again because it's that poison kind of funny and says, " _Who the_ fuck _do you think would be willing to get that close to me_?" 

Steve blinks, the kind that comes with not even beginning to understand what you just heard, not because you can't but because it was so far away from what you expect to hear that you have to run the record again a few times to figure out what you _did_. You have to listen and think again, make sense out of noise. 

Bucky waits until Steve's face moves into the frown of trying to decide whether or not to believe and goes on, "I was a fucking nightmare, I _am_ a fucking nightmare, except those walls were pretty much concrete so I just put my fist through people's heads, their ribcages, whatever else was there when I lost it and they sure as fuck didn't know when that was going to be. Neither did I. And yeah, every time it happened I paid for it. And it happened anyway. No pattern, no fucking warning." 

He chokes another laugh. "Fuck, Steve, they cleaned me with a god-damned hose - people with _any_ kind of sanity kind of like to be on the other end of a gun from me - and far enough away I can't just fucking take it from them before they can even hope to fire." 

And fuck, even when it comes to wiping out one fear Bucky still hates telling Steve these things, hates helpless anger Steve tries to hide because he's got no _fucking_ clue what to do with it. It just makes him miserable. Bucky hates that. 

He's losing his balance at that edge; he looks up at the ceiling straight ahead for a minute and breathes carefully, reins that in hard. He says, "The only people who didn't spend every fucking minute near me praying they were somewhere else and praising God the minute I was back in cryo were Zola and Pierce. Zola got more out of cutting people open while they watched him do it and Pierce - " his mouth twists a little; Pierce . . . those are memories he doesn't touch, doesn't want to; they cut wrong, rip the wrong things out. Zola's worse some ways, but he was also a twisted fucking little monster, and its easier to throw him away. 

"Frankly," Bucky says, bitter-copper-iron taste in his mouth, "Pierce wouldn't've sullied himself." 

He glances at Steve, catches a look just disappearing from his face and shakes his head and adds, "And fuck, even you have to admit the fact that you just got even the tiniest bit offended is funny. It's awful, but it's funny." 

Steve looks down for a beat and then sits up and back a bit. "Fine," he says, reluctantly. "A little. Mostly awful." 

And he spends a minute fighting with that miserable anger, looking away, eyes restless and falling everywhere _else_ Steve can possibly look until he thinks he's got a handle on himself. Bucky waits. He can wait. The laughter's fading and taking some of the razor-edges with it, or dulling them down. For now. 

"Other than to cut me up, beat me, fight me or repair me, Steve," Bucky says, when Steve finally looks back at him, "the last person to touch me was you." 

And there's a lot he doesn't say, and won't; the edges of missions, things he oversaw, things he was ordered to make other people do. Or how fucking starved for other people you can get even when you can't remember last week or how to _be_ a person and what that means you'd be _willing_ to do, if anyone tried. 

He's thought about that, more than once. Usually left marks on Steve's neck less than twenty minutes after. 

Bucky watches Steve's face and for once - well, for once as of, what, a few fucking months ago - it's hard to tell what he's thinking or even the tone of the thoughts, other than they're a fucking mess. He's looking down towards the floor, head turned just barely to his right, Bucky's left, but whether he's looking at Bucky's left arm or just staring into the middle distance, Bucky can't tell. 

"I'm sorry," Steve says, eventually. "I know you don't want to hear it, but I am. I'm sorry I fucked up, I'm sorry I let you fall, I'm sorry I didn't find you - I'm sorry I wasn't _there_." 

And he might have had more, but Bucky cuts him off. Because he's thought about that, too. And even after he made himself _stop_ those thoughts like to work their way into nightmares, his sleeping mind coming up with images he'd claw out if he could. 

"Why?" he demands, harsh enough that Steve looks at him like he's startled. "So they could lay another trap that _worked_? So they could have a fucking matched set? So they could put a god-damned gun to your head and _make_ me give up?" 

The look on Steve's face, startled and open, says that's never crossed his mind. Bucky isn't surprised, but its eaten its way across his often enough. It never occurs to Steve that he'll lose. It never has. "Don't be fucking stupid," Bucky says, softer. "You want to be sorry for something," he adds, "be fucking sorry for crashing the _Valkyrie_ without even _trying_ to get out. If we _had_ both fucking died I'd've been waiting at the Gates for you to kick your sorry ass for that." 

Steve rubs the back of his neck and shakes his head. "I think your priorities are a bit skewed," he says, but at least the guilt's melting into a kind of wry, rueful amusement. 

"Yours are fucking broken," Bucky retorts. "Now let me up, my belt's digging into my back."

Steve leans back, takes his weight on his arms and lets Bucky up, sitting back down the floor. He's still giving Bucky a slightly suspicious look, but it's less . . .raw, less anxious, less _fearful_. And it's _exactly_ like Steve to work himself up into a knot like that, torn up about what he should and shouldn't do. 

Bucky pushes himself up to sitting, somehow tweaks the side of his neck while he's doing it and rubs at it with his right hand. "Punk," he adds, because while Steve may look less raw Bucky feels like someone took a cheese-grater to the inside of his skin, and it burns and he needs to say _something_ , needs to make Steve stop looking at him like that, he doesn't care how much reason Steve's got. 

A smile ghosts briefly on and off Steve's face and he looks down at himself a little theatrically. "Nnh," he says. "Maybe for you. But I got a little broad for that one while you weren't looking." When Bucky snorts laughter at him, shifting sideways so he can lean his back against the front of the couch, Steve adds, "You're still a jerk." 

"Of course I am," Bucky replies, digging one knuckle into the side of his neck. "I'll always be a jerk. Now I'm just a fucking crazy jerk." 

"You're not crazy," Steve objects, unexpectedly emphatic. Bucky makes sure the look he gives Steve is full of disbelief. 

"Jesus, Steve," he says, "I am the definition of crazy. _Bucket seats_ give me flashbacks, half the fucking flashbacks are practically hallucinations, I remember maybe half my life and half of that might be made up, I'm _lucky_ if I'm actually in control of half of what I do, if you _couldn't_ talk me into shit I wouldn't do anything about how I hurt a lot more than half the time and I'd probably starve to death and to top it all off I haven't even _tried_ to drown myself yet." He meets Steve's gaze and says, "Face facts, Rogers - I am clearly completely fucking insane." 

He catches Steve's spark of amusement and groans, adds, "No, don't make the pun. That's an awful pun. Those've been awful puns since we were sixteen." 

"I think they were awful before that," Steve says. "We just didn't realize it." He moves so that he's sitting beside Bucky with his back against the front of the couch; and if you know what you're looking for, he's still worried and troubled and unsure, and Bucky sighs and digs his right thumb into his temple for a minute. 

"You know," he says, looking down for a second and then at Steve, "if you can't trust me on anything else, you should be able to figure out - Christ, after all the rest of the shit I've put you through - no, shut up," he says when Steve tries to interrupt, " _Steve_ , shut up - _after all the shit I put you through_ ," he repeats, "I wouldn't do that to you on top of it. I wouldn't dump that on you." 

Steve starts with, "Bucky - " but Bucky holds up his left hand to stop him, and shakes his head. 

"Shut up," he says, "stop thinking about arguing with me and think about what I just _said_ for a minute. Because if you can't believe anything else you should be able to believe _that_." 

Steve looks down at the floor between his feet; Bucky watches him, sees the muscle in Steve's jaw tic. Waits. 

"Yeah," Steve says after a minute, raising his head. "Maybe I can." Then he gives Bucky a sidelong look and adds, "I could probably believe you more often if you didn't lie so much." 

And as far as he can remember, or trust those memories, Bucky's _always_ hated it when Steve does this, when it starts to look like they're done you take your guard down and he suddenly veers left into a whole new road, especially when he's being obnoxiously fucking pointed while he's at it. 

"I don't lie," he says, automatic. 

"Yeah, you do," Steve replies, sounding amused and resigned at the same time. "A lot." 

"Sometimes I rearrange perspective," Bucky says, which is admittedly pretty much admitting defeat. 

"Also known as lying," Steve says, because it's Steve. 

"Like you wouldn't if you were me," Bucky says and then tries to cut that thought short with a steel wall, before it crawls down his spine and makes him sick. 

"Like you wouldn't give me Hell for it if you were me," Steve retorts. "Actually, toss that, _you did._ And then you _still_ went right on to lie - no," he says before Bucky can interrupt, holding up one of his hands, "you go ahead and _tell me_ you didn't spend '43 to '45 lying to me about how fucked up you were. Even when I _asked_. Go ahead." 

_Fuck._ Bucky closes his mouth, looks right at the floor for a minute while his eyes burn. Breathes carefully, before he can manage to say, "Should never have let you anywhere fucking near a psychology book." 

"No," Steve says, mostly serious. "You're stuck now. I can _tell_ when you're lying _now_ , Buck. I just . . . " he exhales, finishes, "I don't always know what the truth is." 

"The truth?" Bucky rubs at his forehead, shrugs. "The truth is pretty much always that I'm more fucked up than usual and I hate it, Steve," he says, because it's true, and he goes on as Steve shakes his head, trying not to smile, "Not that complicated." 

"I was thinking about more specific detail," Steve replies, dry; then, more serious, he says, "You could just tell me stuff. I mean, I'm not going anywhere. You could go, but I'll just follow you. And that pretty much means you can't . . . keep me safe from whatever's going on in your head. Eventually it comes out." He shrugs. "Might work better if we talked about it before it explodes." 

He's not wrong. Again. Bucky sighs, pinches the bridge of his nose. Says, "Sometimes I really hate you," which is if not the biggest lie he's ever knowingly told at least amongst the strongest possible fucking contenders for the title. 

"Yeah, but you're stuck with me," Steve says. And then adds, "And if you're not hungry, you should be." 

For that, Bucky stares at him for a minute, then reaches behind and hits Steve with a couch throw-pillow, as Steve ducks, grinning, because he deserves it. 

 

They end up going out to find food, if not to eat; it's cold but the sun decides to show its face for a while, and Bucky's starting to see the value in leaving the condo at least once a day, and not only to go up to the roof. 

On the way back Steve looks up at the sky. He says, "You know what I always end up thinking, this time of year?" Bucky gives him a sideways glance. 

"That it's nice everything doesn't stink of coal-smoke?" he says, which is mostly what he's been thinking. 

"Actually, yeah," Steve says. "I mean, I was going to phrase it as, central heating's nice, but mostly it's nice not everything stinks of coal-smoke." 

 

Bucky eats spanikopita standing up in the kitchen; Steve decides to be human and sit at the table, with a knife and fork and everything. "You know what I saw the other day?" Steve asks, in the middle of it, and Bucky shakes his head. "A pub advertising 'traditional Irish fare'." 

Bucky pauses in the middle of eating and frowns. "Do they _know_ what we used to do to food?" 

"Apparently not," Steve says, looking amused. "I'm pretty sure they're using stuff in their recipes that we didn't have." 

"And avoiding stuff we did," Bucky says, shaking his head. "Since I'm pretty sure half of what we used to eat - " 

" - breaks all possible health and safety laws? Yeah," Steve says. "Me too. Actually, half is generous. Probably more like two thirds. In a bad year, probably three quarters." He gets up and puts his plate in the sink, because the washer's full of clean dishes and neither of them feels like emptying it. Bucky skipped the problem by eating his food right out of the container, which he dumps in the trash. 

And he gets about three steps out of the kitchen before Steve's pushing him up against the wall and he's not surprised - part of him's not surprised, even manages to make him say, " _Took_ you fucking long enough," when they break the first kiss for air - but with the rest of him there's a knot in his chest that undoes itself so fast it hurts and he has to remember that he's only safe to clutch with one hand, that if he does with his left he's going to break Steve's fucking shoulder and that, that is _not_ conducive to anything he wants. 

"Wanted you to eat first," Steve murmurs against Bucky's mouth, catching both hands under Bucky's thighs and lifting him so he can wrap his legs around Steve's waist. 

He says, "Yeah, because it'd be really sad if I passed out," because he's light-headed already; Steve retaliates by biting at the line of his jaw and he lets his head fall back against the wall. 

Then Steve's mouth is by his ear and his breath is against Bucky's skin as he says, "And I _do_ trust you, you jerk," and there is absolutely no fucking way they're making it to the bed this time.

No way in _Hell_.


	5. Chapter 5

One of the problems with Tony Stark - one of the many, _many_ problems with Tony Stark - is that he gets worse when he feels he's performing for an audience. Which is why Steve is only annoyed, not surprised, when Tony only waits until they're _halfway_ across the restaurant patio call out, "You _have_ figured out there's something past third base by now, right?" and then to add, "And ah! Winter is coming!" before Elizabeth hits him on the arm with her silverware roll and hisses something sharp and short. 

The first one Steve ignores; the second makes him glance back at Bucky, who just briefly looks to Heaven. "He did it last time," he says, quietly. He gives Steve a darkly amused glance and adds, "Ignore him. Maybe he'll go away." 

Steve feels his mouth twitch. His mother's favourite admonition - usually delivered while cleaning one or both of them up from a fight so Bucky wouldn't get in trouble with his parents - hadn't worked on the neighbourhood bullies and probably wouldn't work on Tony Stark, either. Or at least, it wouldn't work _before_ he'd escalated to a point beyond which _anyone_ could be expected not to break his jaw. 

Steve'd been a little surprised Bucky had decided to come. The invitation to lunch had included him, but so has every invitation for the last several weeks, and there have been a few, giving Steve a slight suspicion that having _got_ Elizabeth's cell number, Sam's been suggesting things at her. (He doesn't ask. Sam might admit it, but then what?) Up till now, Bucky's waved them off; today he didn't. He's quiet and more closed off than he's been, but he's here. Steve figures that's impressive enough. 

"We're sorry about him," Elizabeth says, raising her voice as he and Bucky cross the last distance to the table and Bucky does a much better job than Steve of ignoring the attention Tony's greeting's focused on them. "He figured out something important about his flying car this morning, so he's a little bit insufferable." 

"I am _wounded_ ," Tony says, folding his sunglasses and depositing them in a jacket pocket. "I think I can be quite easily suffered. I think that's harsh. Don't you think that's more than a bit harsh, Bruce?" 

"Still not getting involved," Bruce replies from the other side of Elizabeth where he's studying the menu. "Will not be getting involved at any future point. My involvement will remain non-existent. Rumours of my involvement will remain greatly exaggerated." 

"Does it work yet?" Steve asks, to head off Tony trying harder to get Bruce involved in the wrangle. 

"No," Tony admits, "but I figured out _why_ it's not working. Now I just have to solve that, piece of cake." He emphasizes with a sideways wave of his hand. 

Elizabeth rolls her eyes and then smiles at Steve and then at Bucky. "I'm glad you could both come," she says. 

The table's for eight, and the patio's enclosed with heaters here and there which Steve thinks kind of defeats the purpose of a patio, but does mean the place can use it even when the weather's miserable. Steve also doesn't think this place has customers on the level of Tony Stark all that often, given how round-eyed the servers look and how hard, once Steve and Bucky have sat down and it's clear Tony's not going to give any more obvious theatre, everyone tries to pretend they're not looking. 

That lasts until Pepper, Dr Foster and Thor make their way over, Pepper as casual as Steve's ever seen her, Dr Foster face-flushed and talking rapidly, and Thor still giving the impression that he's trying his very best and politest not to step on anyone. 

If it were just Dr Foster and Pepper, they might have continued to go "unnoticed"; but at Thor, a lot of people - including the servers - just stare openly. 

" - and that's basically how they work," Dr Foster's saying to Pepper's completely not at all glazed expression that must have taken years to perfect, only the slightest hint around her eyes that she hasn't understood a word for the last few minutes at least. Steve only catches it because he's looking for it, and knows it's there. "It's _amazing_ and they use them for toys!" she adds as she sheds her coat and pulls back her seat. Then she looks around and says, self-consciously, "Annnd I should probably lower my voice now. Hi. Again. Steve and - James," she says and then goes, "oh God, I swear I'm just really horrible at introductions. Reintroductions, I guess - " 

"Jane," Thor interrupts gently, very clearly trying not to laugh. "I think you should probably just sit down." 

"Right," Dr Foster says. "Right." She sits, reddening slightly, and Steve feels a lot of sympathy for her. 

"Jane," Pepper says, in her most serene voice, which is the one she usually uses to gently undercut Tony when she thinks he's being excessive, "was just telling me that on Asgard they have flying balls." 

Tony's eyes narrow at her. "Of course they do," he says, not graciously, and Steve sees Thor move a hand to cover a smile. 

Steve catches Bucky giving him the look that says Steve's friends are all _still_ crazy. 

 

And they are, really - both crazy and friends. After lunch and its cycle of more-or-less publicly acceptable small-talk, or what passes for small talk when you have a table full of people like them, they end up going for a walk at Thor's suggestion: even in the cold, which Thor doesn't really feel (and to be fair, neither does Steve, although he tends to act like he does), he apparently likes Central Park. 

There's three missing, assuming Barton's forgiven Steve and/or Bucky for the heart attack of the summer, but Steve's had intermittent texts from Natasha about surprisingly normal things - complaining about airport security, being delighted with a hotel room, asking him if he ever did talk to Sharon, recommending a good wine - which Steve decides is a good sign. He _did_ ask Maria Hill and, after a certain amount of hunting around, managed to find a bottle of Barton's preferred tequila, which is waiting back at the condo for the day either he or Natasha show up again. 

Sometimes Steve remembers Loki's jab about lost souls, and it makes him smile, slightly. So does watching the little knot of Jane, Bruce and Tony talk, or argue (it might be the same thing, with them) and Tony moving from one side or the other, or occasionally walking backwards in front of them both. 

To Steve's unspoken and hopefully not-really-shown surprise Bucky's walking slightly ahead of him, Elizabeth having claimed his arm. She's talking, animatedly, with the occasional comment from Pepper on the other side of her; Steve can't see his face, but Bucky's posture isn't _too_ much like watching a strange new snake crawl up his leg. Just a little bit. 

Beside Steve, Thor says, "You are much happier, my friend. I'm glad." 

Shaking off other thoughts, Steve looks at him a little bit in surprise: there's no question there, no hazard, just a definite statement. Thor's returning half-smile is knowing, but in a different way than Elizabeth's. 

Elizabeth reminds Steve of his mother, sometimes. With that look, Thor actually reminds him of Peggy. 

"While obviously I allow that the first time we met was not a terribly happy occasion," Thor says, "it was still over twenty-four hours, with a hard-won victory to celebrate at the end - which much experience tells me most often brings out each person's lighter side. And yet by the time our food was brought to the table I had seen you smile many times more than I saw in all those hours, even in victory, and heard you laugh for the first time." He nods towards Bucky. "This in spite of your clear concern for your friend, and how he was. And is." 

"Yeah, well," Steve says, wryly. "I'm not that good at hiding what I feel." 

"Nor am I," Thor says, with a small grin. "It has its uses. At least people seldom receive the wrong impression." 

"True enough," Steve agrees, and then says, "And I am happier." And he knows he's definitely _not_ being hard to read in looking at Bucky right then, but he also doesn't really give a damn. Thor follows his gaze and for a second looks graver. 

"How is he?" he asks, in a quieter voice. "Stark told me some, at least, of your story and his. I am greatly impressed that he came today." 

"So am I," Steve admits. If Elizabeth weren't to all appearances actually holding Bucky's attention, he might have left it there, but they're far enough behind, and she's speaking loudly enough and they're talking quietly enough that it's probably fine. "He's better than anyone has any right to expect," Steve says. "Especially me." 

He's surprised by how clearly the look Thor gives him says that the other man understands what Steve's _not_ saying as well as what he is, what that kind of answer covers up. But he only says, "I'm glad," again, and leaves it at that. 

Right then Jane yelps, tripping over something and being caught by the elbow by Bruce and Tony both before insisting, "No, no, I'm fine, I just wasn't paying attention and stubbed my toe - but the thing is - " and Steve smiles slightly. 

"Is Jane always that nervous meeting new people?" he asks. Jane had insisted Steve abandon "Dr Foster" for her given name about two minutes into lunch. _Only people who don't really like me call me Dr Foster_ , she says. 

"Yes," Thor says, frankly. "I have gathered that particularly in younger years, interest in science and knowledge such as Jane has always had is not . . . socially rewarded," and that sounds like he's picking his words very carefully from a slightly foreign language. "Particularly in girls and young women. This seems strange to me, but - " 

"It's unfortunately more or less true," Steve tells him. "It's complicated - which is not me defending it," he adds, firmly. "It's stupid. It's just . . .also complicated." 

"I suppose every culture must have things like that," Thor says thoughtfully, then shrugs. "This seems to have left Jane with a certain belief that anyone new will judge her harshly. Among those she does not care for, this is not a problem." He smiles briefly, the way you do at a memory. "Even my father did not much impress her. But among those on whom she wishes to make a good impression, however, it makes her nervous and unsettled. I have found in general it is best to merely get her through those moments until someone says something she finds interesting. Her enthusiasm generally takes her from there." 

Steve looks at the three arguing scientists - engineer, physicist, astrophysicist - and makes a guess. "That's part of why you've stayed longer than you meant to, right?" 

Thor smiles. "I will admit I have enjoyed seeing Jane's expertise valued by those she also esteems," he agrees. "I think it has been good for her. She is used to working alone, or only with Erik, and having to fight for what recognition she receives, and what facilities. It's a novel experience, I believe, to wish for a piece of equipment and have it arrive within a week." 

"I'm surprised it takes that long," Steve says and Thor laughs. 

"Sometimes it does not. And for me - the city is interesting. There is a great deal here, and a great deal of knowledge about Earth elsewhere readily available in the Tower, either in the records or in the people who work there, who are gratifyingly patient with my questions." He shrugs. "When Jane gets restless or some need arises, we will move on, but for now I at least am content." He gives Steve a sideways look and adds, "Which I must admit is a very unfamiliar feeling for me, but, I think, to my taste." 

Steve laughs, which makes Bucky turn around to give him a querying look, and Pepper to decide - or possibly take the moment of majority distraction to declare - that it was time for her and her cold feet, at least, to go inside. 

 

"What was Elizabeth bending your ear about?" Steve asks, later, when they're at home. It'd been another two hours before Bucky's body-language had told Steve firstly that he'd had enough, and secondly that he wasn't going to say anything about it and would mostly rather bite his tongue off. 

Now Bucky's sprawled out on the couch leaning against Steve's side and staring at the coffee in his mug as much as he's paying any attention to the show he put on, some complicated Korean drama; Steve can't understand a word they're saying, but the basic plot-line of people being in love with, having affairs with and occasionally killing people they shouldn't is pretty clear, even thought Steve's mostly been sketching. 

Bucky shifts slightly, like he's surfacing out of deep thought, and then says, "Anything and everything that crossed her mind that she didn't think would upset me. I can see why you like her," he adds. "She's as bad as you are." 

"I'll take that as a compliment," Steve replies dryly. Bucky snorts and goes quiet for a minute. 

"She's good at being non-threatening," he says, clinical. "I think she was mostly trying to make sure you felt like you could back off a bit, and figured she'd be the one least likely to be a problem. And no," he goes on. "Before you ask. It doesn't bother me." 

One of the things that letting go of worrying about every single touch has done, Steve will admit, is make it easier to respond to things like that, the things that are true if you take a certain definition of words - like "bother" - and not if you take others. It's easier to communicate the _meaning_ of how Steve wants to reply by running the thumb of the arm he has around Bucky's shoulders down Bucky's bent forearm, along the line of muscle that's always too tight because of everything he can only do with that hand, than it would be to try to find words to put around the ideas of _thank you (for putting up with my friends) (for coming at all) (for taking things in the spirit they're meant)_ or _you're still allowed to be annoyed_ , without the words hitting the wrong notes and shattering. 

"Stark's trying to poach the astrophysicist," Bucky adds. "You should tell him that collecting every single scientist and engineer on the planet is too expensive, even for him." 

"He doesn't want all of them," Steve replies, wryly. "He just wants the ones he likes. I don't think Jane's someone it's easy to tie down, though." 

"No," Bucky says. "Ross and Banner were looking for somewhere to root. She's not. She stays places, she doesn't live there." 

He watches the TV screen for a while, and Steve finishes the eyes for the lion he's sketching. After a while Steve says, "I'm probably going to redo the kitchen in the spring." 

"Really?" Bucky says, sarcastic but not edged. "Now that I never would have guessed, with eight dozen catalogues all over the place and you measuring everything." 

"Shut up," Steve says, briefly digging the knuckle of his thumb into the back of Bucky's shoulder. 

"I'm still just impressed you _thought_ about the weather before you started," Bucky informs him. "And there wasn't suddenly accidentally a razed kitchen." 

Steve gives him a mock-glare, which Bucky ignores. "Have a preference for when I start?" he demands, feels Bucky's shoulders move as he shrugs. 

"Hot plates are cheap," he says. "They plug in anywhere." 

 

It's ten PM when Steve's phone alerts him to an email from Elizabeth, from her Stark Enterprises email address; he's not going to bother wondering what she's doing in her office at this hour of the night, but he doubts Bruce is happy about it. 

He opens the email, takes a very quiet full breath, and then hands the phone over the Bucky as he comes in to bed. 

Elizabeth probably would have phrased it differently if she'd been sending the email directly to him, but Steve doesn't think it matters that much, or that there's any amount of word-dancing that can do anything useful. So it just says, _The replacement prosthetic is ready. At this point all that's left is discussing if, when, where, and exactly how details of the transfer will work, and for me to get a blood sample so I can manufacture a functioning anaesthetic. (It'd be going to me, personally, and I personally will do the manufacture and then the sample will be destroyed; my word on that.) Let me know. - E._

Bucky reads it, tosses the phone back to Steve and says, "Fuck," before he drops himself down flat onto the bed. 

"It's up to you," Steve says, in case it needed emphasis. 

Bucky just says, "I know."

******

After three hours of fitful broken sleep Bucky gives up, lies on his back with one ankle across Steve's and stares at the ceiling. Remembers that once upon a time if he couldn't sleep and he was trying to think he'd end up toying with his dog-tags, scraping them against each other or running them back and forth on the chain. Wishes he had something like that now, without being able to think of anything he could stand to wear.

It's only a question because of - because he doesn't know what'll happen if he tries. The better _anything_ else gets the more the pain and nerve-static stand out, the more they end up their own problem. The more he can _feel_ them making other things worse, because on the days they ebb, everything's just that little bit easier. 

The pieces of his mind that balk at the idea because of the thing itself, as an object, because of old fear and who made it - those pieces he'll happily break to fucking pieces and sweep up later. And as much as he trusts anyone, Ross and Stark qualify, if only because they both value Steve and know him, know where betrayal in that quadrant ends. There's no reason not to move on replacement, as soon as possible. 

Except one. 

And even there, he doesn't know. 

There's no trick he can think of, to duck the risk. Sedation - he knows at least some of the things he's burned through before, infection, poison, drugs, and he doesn't think there's a sedative in the world that he won't burn through just as easily when the panic hits, and it might, when the stuff starts to work. The risks are the same for doing a trial first, except _then_ his body'll have a chance to learn what the stuff is, and the second time might not follow on the first. 

Thinking about going through awake - even that much is enough to pull up memories that pave the way to checking out, to blacking out, and that . . . 

No matter how he turns it over there isn't a new answer, there isn't something he hasn't thought of, and he can't - it's fear, stupid and mindless and animal, and it weights the scale towards _no_ towards _fight_ towards _run_. It muddies the water, so much that he can't find where it ends and sane concerns begin, how much to weight the other side back so he can fucking think. 

It's the part that doesn't care about differences, only what's the same; the part that on bad days makes for a second or two after even Steve touches him that everything tries to flinch away, or go dead if it can't. And it's the part that's never, _never_ going to let him go back down again, will kill first and die first, for all the good believing that ever fucking did. 

Useless then and now, blocking the road. The irony is funny, and hateful. 

He's still turning it every way he can when Steve rolls over, awake; even though he sees it Bucky still starts when Steve gently catches his hand and goes to push it away from where, without something else to toy with, he's been digging at the scarred seam - not back from it, but the scar itself, the edge between metal and skin. Steve catches his hand, says, "You're gonna make yourself bleed," and then stops, because instead of letting Steve push his hand away Bucky moves, catches Steve's hand instead and pulls it down to scarred skin. 

Bucky doesn't let go right away - he's not sure what he's doing, or what he's going to do, and it _hasn't_ just been Steve being leery that makes this scar something that gets touched by accident, coincidence, and briefly, and never on purpose. _He_ doesn't touch this skin much, leaves his counter-stimulus bruises back where the skin's whole again. Bodies aren't meant to slide from flesh to metal like that, and something in the subconscious knows. 

So even he avoids it. 

Steve doesn't move his hand, doesn't pull it back or out of Bucky's grip; he shifts around, so that he's turned all the way over and braced on his other arm. "You okay?" he asks, and Bucky realizes his breathing went shallow, makes himself exhale completely before he answers. 

Steve's thumb, forefinger and half his palm are on metal; the other half and the other three fingers on skin, with nothing in between to interfere with sensation. And he's paying _attention_. And it's strange and mixes in strange ways and that's still going to be there, whatever he does, because he's much too used to using this arm in certain ways to want pain back from it, even if pain meant he could feel other things, too. 

"I don't know," Bucky says, still looking at the ceiling. He lets go of Steve's hand, lets his fall to rest on his stomach. Steve moves his hand up the line of metal and skin and it still feels strange. Just - strange. "I don't think I want this anymore," he says, turning his head towards Steve and managing a crooked shadow of a smile. "But I don't think it's worth killing Ross over." 

"It's hurting you," Steve says, simply. "By definition, I want it gone. And - I think you're stronger, in this, than you give yourself credit for." 

Bucky gives him a long look, considering, and then says, "Yeah, but you're a hopeless optimist." 

"No," Steve corrects, "I'm a hope _ful_ optimist. And it's worked okay so far. You're here," he elaborates, when Bucky frowns at him. "Everything else we can work out." 

For a long time the only answer Bucky can scrape up is a curse; eventually he scrapes up, "Fine. If I kill everyone I get to say _I told you so_ before you kill me." 

"Whatever you want," Steve says, humouring him reaching across to pull Bucky closer. "Not going to happen anyway." 

The way he's lying means he ends up with Bucky's left arm along his side, his other arm stretched across Bucky's chest, head on the pillow level with Bucky's neck. "You're going to wake up with - " Bucky starts. 

"Shut up and go to sleep, Buck," Steve interrupts him. "I'm fine, so are you. We can talk about it tomorrow." 

 

He does sleep, some; wakes up around four in the dark and sighs, gets up, measures out coffee, sets it on the stove. Tries to figure out what there is to eat that doesn't turn his stomach, falls back on two cereal bars and two of the cold hardboiled eggs in the fridge. 

Sometimes he wonders if he'll ever _like_ food again, want it for anything other than to stop the feelings he knows to interpret as hunger. So far, everything ranks from indifference downwards; even if it's good it's at arm's-length, waiting for the cost. Which is probably a fucking metaphor for life, really. 

Steve finds him an hour and a half later, sitting at the kitchen table, chair turned backwards, the photocopy of Stark's design he kept spread out in front of him. Steve gets himself coffee and fills up a pot with water, puts it on the stove and scoops in steel-cut oats, the grains rattling against the stainless steel measuring cup. 

"You know," Bucky says, without really looking at him, "I'm pretty sure there was at least one point you swore you'd never eat porridge again." 

Steve doesn't answer right away, finishes what he's doing and comes over to sit in one of the other chairs, mug in hand. "And I'm pretty sure I said the same thing about this coffee, and I was wrong about that, too," he says, leaning forward with his forearms on the table. 

Bucky gives him a sardonic look. "Are you sure you want to be admitting fallibility to me right now?" he asks, pointedly. 

Instead of answering, Steve turns the unfolded design a little. It's actually about six sheets of paper taped together and then folded, to match the unfolded design Stark sent. He could have kept that one, but it would've meant finding some other way to give Stark his answer, beyond just sending the marked one back. Which was another thing Bucky couldn't do. 

"I'm still not an engineer," Steve says, tilting his head, "but to me it looks a lot similar to what you have." 

"It is." Bucky sits back, finds himself reaching across with his right hand and stops it, turns it into rubbing some tension out of his neck. "I know how this one works. And - " He looks up to meet Steve's gaze and says, "It's mine." He shrugs. "It's all mine. Nobody asked me if I wanted any of it - nobody gets to take it away." He picks up his mug and swallows the rest of the lukewarm coffee. "And right now," he adds, "I don't care how fucked up that sounds, or how fucked up it is." 

"I think it makes sense," is all Steve says, and holds out his hand for Bucky's empty mug. Bucky hands it over, stares through the paper a bit more, only listening. 

Sometimes he doesn't think people appreciate how many discrete noises there are in sound, in actions: skin against plastic handle, steel scraping against steel, liquid moving, pouring - never mind the dozens of small noises in someone moving, wrapped in cloth, and not trying to hide it. The world is fucking filled with noise. 

When Steve comes back, Bucky takes the mug, looks at him and says, "And what happens if you're wrong," and he lifts the mug a little bit, to indicate it, "this time? And don't," he adds, as Steve opens his mouth, "fucking blow me off this time." 

"I wasn't," Steve says. "And I'm not wrong." 

"Jesus, Steve - " Bucky starts, and Steve talks over him. 

"It's been a year and half," he says, raising his voice and then lowering it again when Bucky stops talking, watches Steve instead, jaw tight and making himself not get up and walk away, "a year and a half since DC, Bucky, and how many people have you killed? How many people have you even _hurt_? I couldn't find you for four months and I'm still pretty damn sure the answer is _none_." 

"Because I fucking make sure I'm away - " Bucky starts and almost throws the coffee in Steve's face when he interrupts again. Doesn't. 

"Because you won't," Steve says. "Because you don't _want_ to, because it matters to you, because you _decided not to_. Jesus, you find ways to cut yourself open before you even lose your _temper_ around me - " 

"And that's _you_." The words snap out, like things breaking, Bucky's mug hitting the table hard enough for coffee no longer hot enough to burn to splash on his right hand; Steve just leans forward, index finger of one hand jabbing at the table. 

"Fine," he says, "it's me, I'm special - I'll _be_ there and if you weren't counting on that _you're_ the idiot this time. I'll be there, and I trust you whether you like it or not." When Bucky looks away Steve pushes with, "And if you think I don't know how much warning you gave Elizabeth last time - " 

"This is different," Bucky says, flat, not looking at him, not wanting to see him. 

"I know," Steve says, lowering his voice. "I know that. But you decided when to warn her, Buck. And _you decided_ to let her keep looking. You won't hurt anyone because you don't want to. Because you decide not to. The way," he says, after a beat that might be hesitation or might be emphasis, right now Bucky honestly can't tell, "you decided to come here in the first place. There's lots of other choices you could've made, God knows, and the only reason you don't see that," he finishes, "is because it's you." 

He hears the words, but they don't actually make sense; when Bucky turns back to look at him, Steve glances down at his coffee and for a minute he almost looks like what even the scraps of Bucky's brain still insists is more familiar, skinny smiling kid at a kitchen (no, this is the dining room - ) table. 

"You've always done that," Steve says, and Bucky doesn't think he's alone in having thoughts slip in time, just for a second. "You've always," he goes on, sitting back up, "acted like any time you did the right thing, which was almost all the God damned time, it was the only thing you could do. Like you didn't have twelve other choices, most of them a lot easier. Drove me crazy." Steve's mouth quirks. "Apparently still does." 

Bucky can't tell if he's looking at Steve or glaring at him; if he wants to shake him or just . . .be somewhere else. "You're full of shit." 

"You know I'm not," Steve says. "You won't admit it, but you know it. Bucky," he adds, and waits until Bucky looks at him, gets Steve's most earnest look possible, which is just fucking obnoxious. "Trust me." 

Bucky tries to swallow, which doesn't work well. After a minute and a few breaths he manages to say, "You are - " 

" - a manipulative little shit," Steve says. "I know. It works. And I'm not wrong this time." 

Bucky leans his head on his hand, watches Steve keep looking earnest and sincere for a while. He says, "How the fuck did you live long enough to be Erskine's guinea pig?" 

"Stubborn, mostly," Steve says, smiling slightly. "And you." 

 

"Logistical issues," Elizabeth says, crossing her ankles and leaning back in her chair. "I suppose the first question is _where_." 

They're in her office and it's only her and Steve; Bucky came as far as the Tower, hit the hallway and then stopped, shook his head, held up both hands in a clear gesture of _I'm out_ and walked away. Steve let him - pulled out his phone and texted _let me know where you end up_ , but otherwise let him. Bucky doesn't seem to have a problem with JARVIS he'll admit to, or show, even as far as Steve can read, so navigating the building won't be hard. 

(JARVIS won't actually respond to just anyone, Steve found out on one of his visits; he'll respond to anyone Tony asks him to, and otherwise seems to pick favourites. The favourites, Steve noticed, tend to be very proud.) 

And it's not like Steve didn't kind of expect it. Actually, he flat out expected it. If he has trouble talking around things that feel like he's exposing weaknesses, vulnerabilities he shouldn't, he knows Bucky feels it a hundred thousand times worse, and it's a bit much to ask someone to give directions to what his subconscious can't help seeing as a bomber. 

"I'm assuming a standard hospital setting is completely out of the picture," Elizabeth goes on. 

"Out of the picture," Steve agrees firmly, "out of the gallery, across the street and hidden in a dumpster around the next block," and Elizabeth smiles at the not-quite-a-joke. 

"Which is not actually a problem," she says, picking the thread back up. "All I need is space, good lighting and my equipment." She hesitates and adds, "Tony technically isn't necessary, but I can justify him as a precautionary measure, and - last time he seemed to help." 

"I will admit," Steve says, "nothing quite says 'HYDRA isn't here' like a Stark. They're much too mouthy; they'd get shot five minutes in." He thinks about what she said and asks, "How much of a precaution?" 

"We're honestly more likely to die in a meteor strike than it is he'll be necessary," Elizabeth replies, "but I don't have to mention that, and you can just forget you know." 

She looks down at her work-top and the list Steve can faintly see outlined in the not-actually-glass and says, "The only issue that concerns me as to _where_ is recovery time - no matter what we do this isn't going to be fun, and while I haven't said anything, I have noticed the two of you don't use cars - or rather: you, singular, accept rides home," she elaborates, "and you, plural, don't. But I can't imagine wanting to wander around in public. The same thing also makes repurposing a room on the research levels less than optimal." 

Her stylus taps on the work-surface as Steve thinks about that, the only sign she's got any nerves about this at all. "Your place is an option," she goes on, "but I'm not sure you want to risk the associations - so," she says, tilting her head, and Steve gives her a confused look until she finishes, "have you _looked_ at your floor yet, Captain Rogers?" 

 

"Honestly," Elizabeth says, as the elevator doors slide open, "I'm amazed he let you go this long without seeing it." 

"Well," Steve says, holding a hand out and tilting it back and forth. "'Let'. Strangely enough him going on about it like an aunt who made me a sweater I'm not wearing often enough didn't actually inspire me to come look." 

He turns, not exactly startled but surprised, as Bucky's voice says, "All your aunts were back in County Kilkenny, they never knitted you a damn thing." 

Elizabeth's turning the lights on, revealing what Tony clearly thinks of as "simple" and "dull"; Bucky's standing up a couple stairs into what looks like it might be a kitchen or a dining area and is probably half the size of their condo. 

Of course he didn't turn the lights on. 

"No," Steve replies, "your aunts did." Bucky frowns. 

"Did they?" 

"Yes. And," Steve adds, "they were always too big."

"Hnh," Bucky says, dismissing it; out of the corner of his eye Steve sees Elizabeth looking amused. Bucky comes down the two steps, stops beside Steve and says, in his driest voice, "You have a floor." 

Steve turns around, attempts to take it all in and sighs. "Apparently." 

 

It's . . . a lot. To Steve, the actual apartment is huge, to start with: three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a ridiculous kitchen, a dining room, a breakfast nook, a living-room, a den and a library. He's actually slightly touched by the library: the bookshelves are empty as yet, but while Steve will admit (and has, reluctantly, even admitted _to Tony_ ) that ebooks are useful and compact, he'd still rather have an actual _book_. 

Separate from the apartment, though, are also what amount to two gyms, the first one full of (extremely new and expensive versions of) the same equipment and machines one would find in a normal gym anywhere in the city, and one that amounts to a gigantic open space with enough bits, pieces and foldaway sort-of-scaffolding to configure more or less any way you want. 

Then there's the art room. 

Which more or less looks like Tony didn't know what anything in the store or the catalogue _meant_ , so he just bought more or less everything and put it away in shelves. Steve just kind of stares at it, not at all sure he _has_ a reaction for this, that one exists in his repertoire, but actually pretty sure that Bucky is privately laughing at him. 

The double-door next to it Elizabeth pushes open with the comment, "This is apparently new," and Steve gets to have his private laugh, because behind the doors is basically a small theatre, with the window made of something that goes opaque and turns into the screen, and either wall lined with what looks more or less like a good start on every movie ever made, organized - at least to start with - by language. 

And you might not think anything of it - anybody might like a nice home theatre - except for the small, rather nice table off to one side with what looks like a single element would like to look if it were making a society debut and a black enamelled coffee pot sitting beside it. 

Steve glances at Bucky, who's _better_ than Steve is at hiding when he's completely caught out and so has the complete blank surprise hidden - probably pretty well as far as Elizabeth's concerned and not even a little as far as Steve's concerned - behind a look of appraisal. Steve suppresses a smile and doesn't say anything. 

And then there's . . . the empty room. "Tony left one or two on every floor," Elizabeth says. "While obviously he wanted to show off how perceptive he can be and give himself a little thrill of delight at having friends to get to know, he also apparently was willing to admit he couldn't predict everything. We were here when the Tower was being rebuilt," she adds, "so ours ended up designed for my Pilates and Bruce's Brazilian jiu jitsu and I have absolutely no idea what Clint, Natasha or Thor have done with theirs." 

"Brazilian jiu jitsu?" Steve says, surprised. "I wouldn't've expected that." 

"He started when he lived there," Elizabeth replies. "He used it to start working on controlling his heart-rate." She glances at Bucky very, very briefly and smoothly goes on to, "Since it's not designated yet, but the apartment's right there, I thought it might work." 

She doesn't add _and since it's got nothing in it and serves no purpose yet if desired or necessary you can knock half the walls out or fill it full of cement or whatever you like_ , but Steve hears it and figures Bucky probably does, too. 

He glances at Bucky, who shrugs and, when Steve and Elizabeth head back down, declines to follow in favour of, in his words, poking around. 

Steve figures there's worse ways to spend the time. 

 

Other things take less time. _When_ is more or less arbitrary: life shapes around the date, rather than the other way around. In terns of _how_ \- a working anaesthetic, no sedation - Steve's only suggestion is a barrier of some kind blocking Bucky's view of the process. "I know," Steve says, when Elizabeth starts to open her mouth, "that the basic grafting and surgical work is done, it's not - " he stops, looks at the tangle of sentences ahead and opts for the quickest, directest ones. "Bucky was conscious," he says, "and aware, during the original procedure. Including amputation and graft." 

When it comes to blank expressions, Elizabeth's good; her only indication that she's having to freeze her face there instead of just thinking about what he just said is the speed of her blinks for a handful of seconds. 

"I see your point," she says, calmly. Very calmly. "A lot of the time it's reassuring for people to see what I'm doing, but I can see why this would not be the case here." 

When he goes to leave, she says, "Steve," and he turns back. "It'll be fine," she tells him. 

He says, "I know." 

 

Steve tries not to expect anything, vague superstition telling him that expecting something gives the future a shape, pushing it towards the expectation or away from it, and since he doesn't know which way it'll go, he doesn't want to do that. It's ridiculous, but that doesn't make him feel it less. 

But he's definitely not surprised - neither of them is surprised - that while the four days before get harder, the four nights are rapidly descending mess. And Steve thinks, and doesn't say, that it's funny how what was a gut-wrenching cause of shock and horror two months ago becomes, still bad, but . . . .solvable, known, understood. 

Funny, once again, how "normal" changes. Including for the things he's not afraid of anymore, and the things that just make him angrier even than he was before - those are still what they are. 

Like spending what feels like for-fucking-ever and is probably more like ten minutes convincing Bucky of where he is, when it is, why Steve's here - but not worrying about whether once he _has_ , pulling Bucky to him as tightly as he can is the wrong thing to do. 

_I'm here, you're here, it's okay, we're alright._

And in the new normal, Bucky argues about that less. Not none. But less. 

 

Morning of, Bucky's eyes look one step away from bruised, and there are a few things Steve just takes as granted, starting with the fact that Bucky's not going to eat and going all the way through to knowing that mostly, if he's engaging with the world at all, Bucky's aware of it as something faintly, and painfully, ridiculous. 

It's the kind of mood where he can find something funny about mass graves, children's bodies included, and in fact did once, and disturbed the Hell out of Dugan with it, Steve remembers. Although Dernier had laughed - and then looked ashamed. 

Now the sense of the painful ridiculous is one step removed, the same way everything gets removed and distant when the inside of Bucky's head is a churning mess. He sits backward on a dining-room chair, holding his mug with his fingers around the rim, while Steve puts clothes, toothbrushes and coffee-mix in a bag; everything else is easy enough to get somewhere else, if they need it. 

When he's done, he goes over to take Bucky's mug and pull him onto his feet; Bucky looks at him and says, "You better not be wrong." 

"I'm not," Steve tells him and Bucky gives him a crooked smile that's half fond, half bitter, and half somewhere else completely. 

"Then let's get it over with." 

 

And Steve isn't wrong, although it comes close enough to worry him, once or twice. 

 

It's funny what little things can do. There are the bigger things, things like the floor to ceiling windows being uncovered and letting in daylight, the operating table that actually is pretty much a bed with a side extension, the fact that apparently Tony had the place painted blue. 

But there's little things, like Elizabeth in a short-sleeved tunic and leggings, her hair in a messy bun and her glasses on, probably looking as little like what came to mind with "scientist" or "technician" as possible - actually, to Steve she looks more like a dancer than anything. 

(Steve thinks he catches the end of a quiet, intense argument between her and Bruce just as the elevator doors opened to let Elizabeth in, one that finishes with her glaring at Bruce and very pointedly stepping into the elevator without him. Steve wouldn't take bets on what it's about.) 

And Tony, eating his damn dried blueberries, offering Steve one as they come in. Steve's not actually sure which counts as Tony winning, this time around, Steve taking one or Steve refusing, so he takes it on the basis that he doesn't think Tony expects him to. It's worth the brief spark of amusement in Bucky's eye, even if the whole thing is recursive: amusement at the fact that Steve's clearly doing something vaguely amusing for his benefit. 

It still counts as a win. 

It occurs to Steve, as Bucky strips off the shirts he's wearing and lies down, face already blank and controlled, that since the last time he didn't get around to asking Bucky what he meant to, what about them Bucky wants to keep close or declare. Now's not the time and for now, at least, he figures the way Bucky actually reaches for his hand is enough to go on. 

Steve's chair is one of the expensive office kind, but it could have been a plastic stool and it wouldn't make much difference one way or the other: he doesn't think, right now, he's actually capable of being comfortable or noticing if he's not. It doesn't matter. 

He doesn't see any more of the procedure than Bucky does, not really. He was right about the barrier, a straight curtain that blocks Bucky's line of sight and, as it happens, Steve's: even with it Bucky keeps his face fixedly turned away, staring at the opposite wall, jaw and neck both tight. Steve holds Bucky's hand between his and a couple of times wonders if Bucky's actually strong enough to break the bones in Steve's hand, and not particularly caring much if he is. 

Bones heal. 

He's vaguely aware that Elizabeth's narrating what she does, and even that Tony's contributing in some way or another to the conversation, probably as irritatingly as he can, but mostly it doesn't register. They could be reciting _Hamlet_ for all he actually cares. He watches Bucky, face and body and eyes, tries to make use of everything he's figured out over the last year. 

To catch the times when the distance is going wrong, going the wrong way, and it does, a couple times. The first time, tightening his own grip on Bucky's hand makes him blink, shift his gaze to Steve for a second and then take a deep breath. The second, Steve reaches over to put his free hand on Bucky's shoulder, then across to the side of his neck and for one bad moment, Steve thinks Bucky's lost track of where he is. 

And then Bucky's eyes focus and it's - not fine, it can't actually be fine, but it's not going to explode. 

On the other side of the curtain, where Elizabeth had stopped and waited, she nods to Steve and bends her head again.

It takes forever and forever turns out to be about two hours long. Then Elizabeth's not idly narrating or responding to Tony anymore, she's stopped and rolled back her chair a little and she says, _Hey_ until it gets through both Steve and Bucky's heads and they look at her. 

"Sorry," she says, with a small, apologetic smile. "I need you to listen. James, you're going to feel a jolt when I make the neuroconnectors live instead of dormant. Basically," she says with the sense that if she weren't talking, her mouth would be tight with disapproval, "a more intense version of what you've been living with. It'll last a couple seconds and then drop dramatically, and the rest should fade out within six hours. Which, given how long it's been a constant, will probably be very strange. But." Her head tilts to one side. "I need you to know the jolt is coming, and it's not something going wrong." 

Steve's . . . not actually sure how much of that Bucky understood, but after a beat or two he nods. 

Then Elizabeth does something and Bucky inhales, sharp and sudden, hand tightening on Steve's and eyes widening. Steve rests his free hand on Bucky's right shoulder and waits. 

Because he's not wrong. 

Relaxation comes slower than reaction. That's probably some kind of universal truth. And as Bucky's muscles release, Elizabeth moves the barrier and you'd almost think nothing had changed, except that the seam-scar along the edge of the metal is red with reaction. Steve glances at Elizabeth and she seems to catch his concern. "It'll fade," she says. "Confused nerves and aggravated skin, that's all." 

She lifts up the box and passes it to Tony and says, more distinctly, "You should be able to move your arm now - fine motor control might take a few hours, but if it's any longer, let me know." 

Bucky gets some of that, at least; he looks down at his arm and closes his hand, but Steve's already sitting up, aware of the shift in Bucky's face and his body, when Bucky closes his eyes and says, in Russian, "You need to make them leave. Now." 

Steve looks up, jerks his head towards the door - but either Tony speaks languages Steve didn't know about, or he doesn't actually need translation, because he's already hooked Elizabeth's arm in his and is gently but very, very definitely towing her out. 

He doesn't even say anything that's supposed to be funny before he leaves. 

The door's barely clicked before Bucky's pushing himself to sitting, breathing like he's been drowning; Steve catches him before he overbalances, says, "Hey, careful - " Then he changes languages, knows his pronunciation's still not great, repeats, "Careful - you'll hurt yourself." 

At first Bucky stares at him, uncomprehending; then his right hand goes to the bridge of his nose, he closes his eyes and manages, "I need to be somewhere else." 

"Anywhere," Steve says. "Just, without breaking your head open on the way because you fall over." 

Steve's not entirely sure what about that's funny, even in an edge-of-hysteria way, but Bucky doesn't argue with him when Steve helps him to the door, and that's the important part. 

Out of habit, Steve flicks off the light. And is pretty sure the option here is going to be _fill it with cement_. 

 

It takes a little more than an hour before Bucky's not reaching hard for English, a little more than that before Steve's not actively worried about how close to any of the edges in his head he is. It might have been faster at home, but they'd've had to get there; for now, the Tower apartment works. 

That doesn't mean Bucky's okay. He isn't. It just means it's the kind of not-okay that Steve knows, and that isn't hovering on the edge of going somewhere unfamiliar and dangerous. 

Steve makes coffee and finds Bucky a new shirt - the others are still in the other room, where he's going to leave them - makes sure all the curtains and blinds are open, while Bucky sits on the floor with his back to the wall. Steve doesn't bother trying to convince him to move until he's done everything that needs moving around, including putting both full cups on the coffee table (on a magazine because he can't find coasters and even if Tony wouldn't care it's a nicer table than he feels happy destroying) and pulling the table in arm's reach of the couch. 

Then he takes Bucky's right hand and pulls him to his feet for the few steps to the couch where he can sprawl, Steve sitting beside him. 

By then he's leaning into touch instead of startling at it. 

It's been two more hours when Steve notices a change in how Bucky's breathing, looks down to see the frown on Bucky's face - the kind you get from being confronted with something unexpected. Steve watches him lift his left arm, open and close that hand for a minute, before he asks, "Hurt less?" in as non-committal a voice as he can scrape up. 

It feels like Bucky starts to answer, stops and snorts a short, soft laugh. "Actually," he says, like he's correcting something he said before, "you probably do have some kind of idea." 

Steve thinks of the moment Howard's machine stopped, of people worrying and how he couldn't think clearly enough to explain that nothing was wrong, that _nothing hurt_ and that was _why_ he felt so dazed, like someone hit him in the head: _nothing_ hurt, and he finally had some idea of what other people felt like when they took a deep breath. 

"Something like one," he says. 

"It wasn't really pain," Bucky says. "Frankly, I'd take pain first - don't look like that," he says, and he isn't actually _looking_ at Steve but Steve has to admit he caught him, "but yeah, it's less. A lot less." He takes a deep breath, a real one and adds, flat and definite. "This better fucking work, Steve, because I am not doing that again." 

Steve can't help smiling, a little. He rests his head the on Bucky's for a minute. "It'll work. Tony knows I don't need any more reasons to throw him off his own landing deck." 

 

There is actually food in the fridge - Indian, in neat containers, with a note in Tony's scrawl saying _heats up fine I don't poison people breakfast sometime after ten if you want_. Steve thinks about Elizabeth's sideways comment about Tony and friends and wonders if, other than Rhodes and Pepper, Tony's ever really had any. Until now. 

And the food's actually good, and at least goes on the list of things Bucky will eat - and by the time he's done eating, the phrase _grey with exhaustion_ keeps surfacing in Steve's mind. So Steve pulls the comforter off the bed in the master bedroom and announces, "I'm going to read; you're going to sleep." 

Bucky gives him a sceptical look, says, "Nice theory," but doesn't actually resist when Steve pulls him out of the kitchen and back to the couch, comforter thrown over, Bucky using Steve's legs as a pillow. 

It doesn't take very long before Bucky is asleep. And Steve hasn't said anything, but even the last few hours, he can see the difference the lower weight makes, in the way the muscles on Bucky's back move. Hallmark probably doesn't make thank-you cards for this, he thinks, and realizes he might be a little giddy. 

He ends up thinking of the stupid anniversary bear, still living on the chair in the living-room at home, and then thinking of the endless rows of costumed stuffed bears at the gift-shop, from the Smithsonian exhibit. Tony might actually even appreciate the joke. It'd just mean going to DC. 

Steve files it away to think about. He finds his book-mark, flips the paperback open and then rests his other hand on Bucky's shoulder. The metal takes a little bit to warm under his hand. 

They could go travelling, he thinks. They meant to, so many years ago. After school, after they saved enough. After the war. And, he thinks, wry, it's definitely after the war. Cars and planes might be a problem, but - 

He never replaced his motorbike - with all the travelling and then living here, he didn't feel like he needed to. It's not that hard to get new ones, though. Two of them. 

Steve doesn't notice he's dozing off until he feels Bucky digging a knuckle into his thigh. "Hn?" he says, and yawns, as Bucky rolls onto his back to look at him. 

"If _you're_ falling asleep," he says, "might as well move this to a bed, so your neck doesn't end up looking like mine." 

"Probably," Steve admits. 

Bucky rolls back over, gets up and holds out his left hand to pull Steve to his feet. Steve's not sure if he's testing himself or testing Steve, but he doesn't say anything. And isn't actually surprised when actually standing up ends with Bucky's right hand at the back of his neck, pulling him into a kiss that goes on for a while. 

Steve's pretty sure the new arm's bothering him a _lot_ less. Even a few hours in. Especially when Bucky breaks the kiss to murmur, "Or I could fuck you in every room in this place." 

Steve bends his head to nuzzle in at the side of Bucky's neck, and say, "Well if you don't have anything better to do - " and grins when Bucky squeezes the back of his neck in retaliation. 

He does have to say, "I told you it'd be - " except he gets derailed when Bucky turns his head to bite the corner of his jaw. 

"Shut up," Bucky says, stepping back and pulling Steve back down onto the couch. "Before you get into trouble." 

 

It's possible, even probable, that at around ten thirty when they do go up the one floor to the penthouse, Tony means to say something about the bruises and other marks, not just look at them in a way that's kind of eloquent in itself, but Elizabeth's sitting on one side and Pepper's on the other, and Steve hears the faint sounds of _both_ Tony's feet getting stepped on. 

There's the faintest sound that might be (and absolutely is) Bucky snorting softly with laughter as he goes for the coffee pot. Elizabeth ignores Tony and the conversation of expressions that he's having with Pepper beside her and looks wickedly amused when Steve looks around and asks, "Where's Bruce?" 

"Hungover," she says. "Someone went drinking with Thor and Jane yesterday. Well - first they played tourist. Then they went drinking. Jane is also miserably hungover, so Thor sends his regrets about breakfast." She transfers her smile to Bucky as he comes to sit down, malice fading out of it, and asks, "Feel better?" 

"Yes," Bucky says, mouth quirking up at the corner. "Thank you." 

"You're extremely welcome," Elizabeth says. And then Tony makes himself the centre of attention by yelping. 

"Pepper that is my _foot_ ," he complains, and Steve wonders what really obnoxious remark Pepper just saved them from this time. 

"Imagine that," she says, giving him a bland look. "Maybe you should go see about the omelettes." 

Grumbling, Tony gets up from the table. And Steve knows Bucky's face once again says, _Your friends: crazy_ , but he's okay with that. He doesn't think he's had any friends that _weren't_ , actually. 

In one way or another.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. <3 If you wanted more, [(even if I could) make a deal with god](http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585) is the direct sequel (with alt-povs and sequential stuff) series of short(er) fic, with [[to see you there]](http://archiveofourown.org/series/19685) and [Settle in and find your home.](http://archiveofourown.org/series/235080) as related series. 
> 
> (this note repeated in epilogue <3)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] your blue-eyed boys (2: daylight could be so violent)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2569316) by [sallysparrow017](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sallysparrow017/pseuds/sallysparrow017)




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